A monument to the Holodomor victims was destroyed in occupied Luhansk

In Luhansk, occupied by Russia, on July 17, the invaders destroyed monuments to the Holodomor victims and victims of Stalinist repressions.

The reason for the demolition of the monuments, as local media write, was that they allegedly “offended the patriotic feelings of Luhansk residents.” The city’s occupation authorities also stated that the decision to dismantle it “was made by city council deputies after appeals from veterans’ organisations” and that “both monuments appeared “in the Ukrainian period”, referring to the times of Ukraine’s independence.

A monument to the victims of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 appeared in Luhansk in 2008 to honour the memory of thousands of residents of the Luhansk region who died during the Holodomor. The names of many of them are included in the National Book of Memory of the Luhansk Region, although thousands of those who died remain nameless victims. The monument to the victims of Stalin’s repressions was erected on September 8, 1990, that is, during the time of the Ukrainian SSR, on the initiative of the local public, because tens of thousands of Luhansk residents became victims of Stalin’s terror.

President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko and the head of the Luhansk Regional State Administration at the unveiling of a memorial stone at the site of the future monument to the Holodomor victims. March 29, 2007.

At the same time, official representatives of the so-called “LPR” say that the monuments have no historical and cultural significance and call them “fake monuments”.

It is worth recalling that earlier, the dismantling of similar memorials took place in other cities captured by Russia, in particular in Donetsk, Mariupol and the Kherson region.

Denial of the Holodomor has been a component of the historical policy of modern Russia for a long time. Conscious and deliberate silencing and distortion of the Holodomor history is one of the tools of the information war that the Russian Federation is waging against Ukraine. Putin’s regime uses manipulation of public opinion and outright lies about the communist past to achieve its goals.

The National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide is outraged by the demolition of monuments and calls on law enforcement agencies to investigate these cynical crimes, as well as to respond to the public denial of the Holodomor by the so-called “officials” of the occupying “authorities”. In particular, the director of the Luhansk Museum of Local History, Artem Rubchenko, made an outrageous comment to the “Luhanmedia” publication, which believes that “the topic of the Holodomor is being artificially inflated by Ukrainian nationalists.”