Dirprwy Lywydd, this Saturday, 24 November, Ukraine and the international community mark the day of remembrance of the victims of Stalin's artificial famine of 1932-33 known as the Holodomor, which, in Ukrainian, means 'death by hunger'. As a Welsh parliamentarian, I will be attending the commemoration in Kiev.

It was a famine created by Stalin to enforce collectivisation of agriculture and to break Ukrainian resistance to Russian Soviet rule. There were more than 4,000 uprisings against this policy, which were ruthlessly suppressed. In December 1932 the central committee of the Communist Party ordered that all grain, including sowing seeds, be seized. Villages that failed to co-operate were blacklisted and deliberately starved to death, and an estimated 1 million people deported to Siberia. An estimated 4 million to 6 million perished. It is estimated that around two thirds of these were children. Precise figures are impossible, because Stalin ordered all records to be destroyed.

Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who is honoured in Ukraine, witnessed the Holodomor and was one of the few journalists with the courage to report on the scale of the famine and its causes. Many countries around the world have recognised the Holodomor as an act of genocide. The 9 December this year is the seventieth anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted in 1948. This Saturday, members of the Ukrainian diaspora living in Wales and around the world will place lighted candles in their windows in memory of the victims.