The BBC did a story on the Ukraine famine last week.

Resentment of Moscow in Ukraine has deep historical roots. In the Great Famine of the 1930s, as many as four million Ukrainians died during the forced collectivisation of farms by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The BBC’s Fergal Keane has been to the eastern city of Kharkiv, close to the Russian border, and met some of the last survivors of the famine.

…Petro Mohalat, now aged 95, remembers the first food raids in the winter of 1932.

He was five years old when the communist “brigade” arrived in the village. His grandmother told the children to hide anywhere they could.

“It was very scary. The brigade had pitchforks and they came to every house searching for bread,” he recalls. “They used crowbars to come inside. Then they went to all the barns trying to find any buried bread.”

Acting on the orders of Stalin, Communist officials seized food and prevented peasants from leaving their villages to search for supplies. They were being punished for resisting the forced collectivisation of farms.

Ukraine calls the deaths of an estimated four million people in the famine of 1932-33 the Holodomor – killing by starvation.

Putin is against all this Critical Famine Theory.

Russia denies that Ukrainians were politically targeted for starvation because Joseph Stalin feared nationalist sentiment. Just over a decade before they had fought to establish an independent nation – but were defeated by the Red Army.

It says much for official attitudes that Russia’s Supreme Court recently ordered the closure of Memorial, Russia’s oldest NGO devoted to uncovering Soviet-era oppression.

Do they call it the 1934 Project?

Dr Drobovych is keen to point out that responsibility for the horrors of that period doesn’t lie with Stalin alone. The repression and the forced collectivisation could not have happened without the participation of vast numbers of Ukrainian Communist officials.

He sees in modern day Russia’s attempts to impose its will on Ukraine worrying echoes of the Soviet past.

“They protect Stalin, they hide truth, they attack us. They don’t recognise us as an independent country, why? We don’t understand why.”

The usual reason. The same reason trans activists and allies don’t recognize women as an independent sex. It’s a power play, it’s dominance, it’s Us Up and You Down, it’s aggression, it’s We Win You Lose.

As all nations know, memory is a powerful weapon. The story of the Holodomor is central to Ukraine’s idea of itself as a country that defies Russian domination.

So Putin is telling them oh no you don’t.