Russia Allegedly Plotted to Starve Ukrainians on an ‘Unprecedented Scale’

An echo of the past intentional genocide of Ukrainians.

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At the Holodomor Genocide Museum in Kyiv. (Photo by SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images)

As I stood last year in a small, sunny town square in the center of a suburb outside Kyiv called Horenka, near Bucha, I scanned the crowd, which had gathered to receive food handouts, looking for old people. I was hoping to do a story about the men and women who remembered World War II as this new war with Russia unfolded.

An older man in the startling combination of a dashing, fedora-style straw hat and a see-through striped shirt saw me looking. Born in 1946, Oleg Stygach had been born too late to have memories of the war against the Nazis, but he said, he did have distinct memories of the starvation he and his family, among millions of others, faced following the war.

“The famine was really, really bad in those times,” Stygach told me. At just 3 years old, he said, “I worked catching fish to survive.” 

As just a tiny boy, he didn’t speak until he was 3 or 4 because, he said, his limited diet of fish affected him to the point where he attributed his full head of hair as a child to the high amount of phosphorus he was consuming by eating only fish.

I asked Stygach, who had been hamming it up for my camera for a few minutes, if he’d ever thought he would see war again in his lifetime. As I previously wrote for New Lines magazine: His reaction was immediate, and similar to others to whom I’d asked this question. He instantly broke into tears and, sniffling, said: “No one can believe this. It’s so scary when the planes fly overhead. All the windows explode. When the planes are near you, all the windows are shattering. It is really, really scary.”

Yet it struck me that it was not just memories of bombs falling but also the memories of a pained, empty stomach that had come rushing back to older Ukrainians in today’s war. Not only do the fears stem from the post-war period, but also from the Holodomor, which was the planned starvation of Ukrainians by Joseph Stalin. At least 4 million Ukrainians, by some estimates, died from this horrific theft of grain in 1932-1933.

And now, Russian President Vladimir Putin is being accused of planning yet another mass starvation of Ukrainians.

A report out this week from the Hague-based human rights law firm Global Rights Compliance has found that there was a  “large-scale, organized Russian plan to systematically pillage Ukraine’s grain, using proceeds to fund occupation and illegal war.”

The firm found that in the lead-up to the invasion, allegedly, a Russian defense contractor purchased three 170-meter grain carriers and three new massive cargo ships as early as December 2021, and that the Russians are said to have deliberately taken over Ukrainian areas rich in grain. Researchers also discovered that an intricate logistics infrastructure had been “built by Russia to steal and transport grain across occupied Ukraine and Russia to the rest of the world for profit.” All of this, the report says, “speaks to pre-planning ‘on an unprecedented scale.’”

The Vicious Calculus of War

Few Ukrainian survivors of the period of forced starvation orchestrated by Stalin in the 1930s are left.

The Holodomor, literally, “murder by starvation,” was, like most famines, man-made, and took as many as 7 million lives. It is, I’ve found in my many years of reporting on genocide, one of the least-known such intentional tragedies.

“In the case of the Holodomor, this was the first genocide that was methodically planned out and perpetrated by depriving the very people who were producers of food of their nourishment (for survival),” according to a fellow of Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute, Andrea Graziosi. “What is especially horrific is that the withholding of food was used as a weapon of genocide and that it was done in a region of the world known as the ‘breadbasket of Europe.’”

That’s the same breadbasket that Russia is accused of targeting yet again today.

Still, Yousuf Syed Khan, a senior lawyer with Global Rights Compliance, said that the “highly systematized weaponization of Ukraine’s grain that we are documenting is unprecedented in modern history, and has involved extremely intricate pre-planning.”

“It is purposefully designed to deny food to civilian populations in third states,” he said. “Russia is doing this to fund its unlawful war effort, to elicit sanctions relief on the world stage, to buy votes in international fora, and to represent itself as the legitimate authority of Ukrainian territory, in turn also weakening Ukraine’s national economy.” 

War creates a vicious kind of calculus. And the strangulation of grain exports these past couple years has already been costly to third countries that have no involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war, prompting an international hunger crisis.

For this reason, Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely to face a second arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, experts say.

Hunger as a Weapon of War

The use of hunger as a weapon of war is particularly brutal. Recently, while at the Auschwitz Memorial in Poland, I learned that the Nazis had created a mini-court system replete with on-site punishments. As if life couldn’t have been more horrific at the concentration camp, men found guilty of various infractions were put into cells and starved to death. That this was a punishment used on top of the nightmare of being forced to live in such a place speaks to the intensity of the pain of starvation.

Back in Horenka, I watched as men and women, boys and girls lined up for food handouts. When the charity declared they’d given out all the food they could, a few older women crowded the man who’d been giving out the meals from the back of a van, demanding more — there were more boxes there, the women shouted. They were hungry. But the man said the rest of the food was meant for the next village.

As a weapon of war, hunger is remarkably effective, whether it is wielded as a means of literal starvation, or as a way of creating mass panic and dividing populations so that people are left fighting to simply survive.

Unfortunately, the purposeful imposition of starvation is an echo of the Russia of the past and, it seems, a possible predictor of the future of war to come between the two countries.

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