One of Vladimir Putin’s central justifications for launching a war against Ukraine rests on his claims that the two countries constitute one people and that Ukraine's status as an independent state is illegitimate.
“Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space,” Putin said Monday in an address to his country in the build up to Thursday’s invasion.
Russians and Ukrainians are now retracing much of the history that has long been at the core of the tension between the two former Soviet Republics.
Among the most significant events being revisited is what is known as the Holodomor, a manufactured famine that ripped through and killed millions in Ukraine in the early 1930s when it was part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, better known as the Soviet Union.
What is the Holodomor and what caused it?
The Holodomor translates roughly to “death by hunger” in Ukrainian. It is how Ukrainians refer to the mass starvation deaths of millions in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The Holodomor was part of a larger famine that swept the Soviet Union as Stalin collectivized the agricultural economy by taking over small farms and prohibiting independent farmers from selling their crops. But specific policy decisions targeting Ukraine intensified the famine there, leading Ukraine and many nations to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide. It’s held that Stalin allowed Ukrainians to starve in order to quash Ukrainian resistance to the reorganization of its farms.
When did the Holodomor start?
The Holodomor took place from 1931 to 1932.
Did Stalin deny the Holodomor?
Stalin and the Soviet Union never recognized the Holodomor as a genocide. Discussion of the event was heavily repressed inside the Soviet Union and the USSR undertook a campaign to conceal the atrocity from the rest of the world.
As Anne Applebaum reported in the Atlantic, journalists in the Soviet Union were subject to intense censure from Moscow. Western reporters, including New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, a Pulitzer-prize winner, downplayed the situation in Ukraine. “Conditions are bad, but there is no famine,” he infamously wrote in one 1933 story.
The present-day Russian government minimizes what happened. In 2017, Russian Spokesperson Maria Zakharova told reporters that the characterization of the starvation as a genocide “contradicts historical facts.”
How many people died in the Holodomor?
Scholars have estimated that anywhere from 3 to 7 million people died.
When is Holodomor Remembrance Day?
Holodomor Remembrance day is observed on the final Saturday of November.
Does the United States recognize the Holodomor?
The United States opened in 2015 a memorial for the Holodomor on the National Mall in DC, and the Obama and Biden White Houses have issued remembrance statements on Holodomor Remembrance Day. But the United states has been stopped short of calling the Holodomor a genocide, even as several countries, including Canada, recognize it as such.
Last year, Biden released a statement that said the millions of Ukrainians who died were “victims of the brutal policies and deliberate acts of the regime of Joseph Stalin.”
“As we remember the pain and the victims of the Holodomor,’ the statement read. “the United States also reaffirms our commitment to the people of Ukraine today and our unwavering support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”
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Why is the Holodomor important?
Despite the death of millions resulting from deliberate policy decisions by Stalin's regime, the Holodomor isn’t widely known in the United States. But it is a key part to understanding the deep divisions between Russia and Ukraine. It marks an early and brutal example in what many Ukrainians say is a long history of Moscow’s hostility toward its southwestern neighbor.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/02/28/holodomor-killed-millions-ukrainians-what-you-need-know/6929903001/ 
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