Lavrov: PACE should not ignore Yanukovych’s opinion on Holodomor,
Interfax-Ukraine, April 28, 2010
http://www.kyivpost.com/news/nation/detail/65316/print/
Strasbourg, April 28 (Interfax) - The statement by Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych on Holodomor in Ukraine is evidence of an objective approach to history and PACE should not help but heed it, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said.
"I believe that it is simply a return to an absolutely normal, reasonable, objective approach to history. I am convinced that PACE will be unable to ignore such an objective fact," he told the press in Strasbourg on Wednesday responding to a question from Interfax.
"The statement by the Ukrainian leader should not be regarded as sensation," Lavrov said. "It would be stretching too much to regard this as a sensation considering the abnormal approach of the previous Ukrainian leader who interpreted the famine of the mid-1930s solely as the genocide of the Ukrainian people though that was not true and could not be," he added.
Lavrov said that the horrible famine was connected with the decisions of the then Soviet leadership. "And Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Belarusians and many other peoples that lived in the territory of the Soviet Union" suffered from hunger, he said.
"This is an objective historical fact," he said.
Lavrov voiced hope that there will no longer be "any attempts to politicize the subject of the famine instead of grieving over the victims of that period belonging to different peoples."
Speaking at PACE on Tuesday, Yanukovych said that he finds it unfair to call the Holodomor of the 1930s genocide of the Ukrainian people. It was a common tragedy of for people that lived in the indivisible Soviet Union, he said.
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