I'm grateful to the Member for Blaenau Gwent for tabling this timely and important debate, as it comes in a week when Russia has celebrated victory day on 9 May, the day that the united Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR, achieved victory over Nazi Germany and the end of the second world war with fellow allied countries. This display of military might through parades acts as a muscle flex towards the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and as a chest-beating exercise to reassure its own citizens that mother Russia is still able to act unchecked.

In Soviet times, victory day was used to mark both the defeat of fascism and the perceived strength and virtues of communism. Thankfully, before the end of the twentieth century, communism was found out as the dangerous ideology that many now see it as, an ideology that left millions of Soviets living under draconian rules, with their liberty lost and millions more dead, having been sent to gulags. Some of us in this Chamber are young enough not to have lived through eastern and western blocs of Europe—indeed, I was born some 12 days before the dissolution of the Soviet Union—but when, in the words of Churchill, 

'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent', we must remember this time.

However, the current events that are taking place in Ukraine, events that the west have long been warned about, are certainly making us realise the danger that a rogue state with an unpredictable leader pose to the peace that many of us have taken for granted for a generation, which the Member for Blaenau Gwent has referenced. Ninety years ago, the Holodomor showed the devastating impact that a power-hungry leader, desperate to cling on to power, can wield if his power goes unchecked. The Member for Blaenau Gwent has already spoken about the devastating impact that this famine had on the people living in Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s. 

If we fail to present a united front against Putin's current illegal war in the region, many in Ukraine and further afield will be at risk again. Of course, this Senedd has shown its clear commitment to stand with Ukraine. The UK Government has been one of the leading western nations in arming and supporting the Ukrainian military, and this Senedd rightly urged the UK Government to go further in supporting Ukrainian refugees. To see a British Prime Minister walk the streets of Kyiv alongside President Zelenskyy, and be the first western leader to address the Ukrainian Parliament, shows that the support our nation has provided Ukraine and its sovereign people has been gratefully received.

Like others in this Siambr and across Wales, I have relatives born outside of these islands, and I know from them first-hand the devastation that war can bring. This is why it is imperative that these same mistakes made during the first half of the twentieth century are not repeated less than 100 years on. And it is through the language we use that we can and must start to do better. Too often, the phrases 'far right' and 'far left' are used when referring to those with whom some may disagree. To use these descriptions in such a throwaway manner does a disservice to those who perished under the rule of real far right and far left authoritarian regimes and dictatorships. The far right is what we witnessed in Nazi Germany and Spain during the 1930s and 1940s. The far left is what we saw in the Soviet Union, where deliberate actions led to the horrific Holodomor or terror famine, leading to the death of some six million Ukrainian people. These regimes murdered many millions of their own people, people whose only crimes were not conforming to the warped ideologies of their leaders.

With the language used on social media still going unchecked and the spread of hatred and abuse becoming far too common, it is important that we as politicians step up and commit to becoming more aware of the language that we use. Some have taken to social media to question why the Senedd is debating this today. As a co-sponsor of this debate, I tell them here and now that it is incumbent on all of us to do better, to be better. By acknowledging the Holodomor and the appalling way the Soviet Union murdered their own people, we keep the crimes of yesteryear close to the forefront of our mind, as those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Diolch.