https://dianefrancis.substack.com/
Vladimir Putin wages genocide, not war, against Ukrainians, as he made clear from the outset of his invasion. His hero, Josef Stalin, did the same and starved to death 3.5 million Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933 for the crime of refusing to leave their farms for collectives.
This “Holodomor” has been condemned by the Vatican, European Union, and recently France’s Senate, as genocide or “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Now Putin perpetrates a bigger genocide by imperilling the hundreds of millions of poor people who rely on Ukrainian food supplies.
He has intentionally crippled Ukraine’s food exports, bombed and contaminated 25 percent of its valuable food lands, and planted deadly landmines across countryside the size of Switzerland, making farming dangerous. Putin is destroying one the planet’s most valuable growing regions, a factor this has finally led African leaders to join forces to try and stop Russia’s war.
Twisted wreckage of a tractor that hit a landmine this spring and killed the farmer as he plowed his fields near Chernihiv.
Russia blames the West for global food shortages and inflation, but Arif Husain, chief economist at the UN World Food Programme, said “we tend to address the symptoms and forget the root cause, and the root cause is war,” he said last fall. “The numbers do not lie. Pre-Covid we were looking at about 135 million people in crisis or the worst type of food security situation. Today, including Ukraine’s impact, that number is 345 million.
For the rest of this column: https://dianefrancis.substack.com/p/russias-global-genocide?utm_source=substack&publication_id=257546&post_id=42869931&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=false