Thank you, Dirprwy Lywydd, and to everyone who has made such thoughtful comments today, and thank you for that commitment by the Minister. I'm pleased that we as a Senedd can express in such a unified way our sympathy and our solidarity with the people of Ukraine, as we note 90 years since the Holodomor, which is called the 'great famine' very often, but, of course, the use of that word 'famine' suggests something natural, when we know, of course, that it was the result of a particular policy, a policy of collectivisation and political decisions made with regard to the Ukraine. 

Stalin said that his policy towards Ukraine was due to the fact that Ukraine opposed his policies. There was famine in huge areas of the Soviet Union as well, but it is Ukraine that saw the greatest numbers of deaths, as the Soviet state took millions of tonnes of grain away from them. We do not know exactly many people died during the Holodomor. As Khrushchev admitted in his biography, nobody was counting. But the historian Robert Conquest uses data from the Soviet census that estimates that around 5 million of the people of Ukraine died as a result. It's impossible to comprehend it. Whole villages were eradicated, as we've heard, cities and roads were littered with the bodies of those who had left their villages to seek food but who died on their journey. The rural areas of Ukraine, the land of the black soil, that was considered to be one of the most fruitful lands in the world, was turned into a silent desert. 

Victor Kravchenko was a Soviet official who was told to take part in the process. He had to flee to the west as a result of what he saw in the Donbas region in the Ukraine of his birth. This is how he described what he saw in Petrovo: