Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Official Report 911KB pdf

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Holodomor Memorial Day

The final item of business is a members’ business debate on motion S6M-11228, in the name of Colin Beattie, on Holodomor memorial day 2023. The debate will be concluded without any question being put.

Motion debated,

That the Parliament recognises that 25 November 2023 is the annual Holodomor Memorial Day; notes that 2022-23 marks the 90th anniversary of Holodomor; considers that Holodomor, literally meaning extermination by hunger, was a man-made and deliberate campaign of starvation and violence carried out by the Soviet regime that resulted in the death of millions of people in Ukraine; believes that Holodomor was caused by a deliberate policy of the Soviet regime, as a mass murder against the people of Ukraine; recognises that Holodomor Memorial Day commemorates all the victims of the Holodomor, and expresses its solidarity with the people in Ukraine who suffered in this tragedy, and in particular with the remaining survivors of the Holodomor and their families; pays its respects to those who died as a consequence of what are considered to be these crimes committed by the totalitarian Soviet regime; expresses deep concern that the 90th anniversary of the Holodomor coincides with Russia’s ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine, which, it believes, involves a blatant violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, coupled with what it sees as the aim to eradicate Ukraine as a nation-state and erode the identity and culture of its people; is aware of the longstanding relationship between Ukraine and Scotland, including the installation in 2017 of the Eternal Memory memorial stone on Calton Hill, Edinburgh, which was dedicated by the Ukrainian community in Scotland to commemorate the genocide by forced famine in Ukraine in 1932-33, and welcomes the formation of the Cross-Party Group on Ukraine within the Scottish Parliament, where Ukrainian interest groups in Scotland and elected officials come together to foster and strengthen the enduring relationship between Ukraine and Scotland.

17:10  

I thank all members who supported my motion for debate. I look forward to hearing tonight’s speeches.

The term “Holodomor” is not a familiar one in Scotland. In Ukraine, it is all too familiar. As we approach the 90th anniversary of the Holodomor on 25 November, and as we observe the actions of the Russian state, which invaded Ukraine nearly two years ago, it is difficult to resist the idea that we are witnessing history repeat itself. The barbaric acts against Ukrainian civilians and, indeed, anyone who falls into Russian hands have shocked most of us. The appropriation of Ukrainian grain and agricultural equipment reinforces the impression.

What is the Holodomor? It translates from Ukrainian as “hunger extermination”. During 1932 and 1933, between 3.5 million and 7 million Ukrainians died of starvation in a famine that was artificially created by the Soviet state and Joseph Stalin, its dictator. We will probably never know the exact figure of all those who died.

There are people who would argue whether the Holodomor was, in fact, genocide, but I would ask them to consider how many millions must die for the term to be accepted. Leading historians who have devoted time to studying the Holodomor have all concluded that it was genocide, 34 nations have agreed that it was genocide, and the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defined genocide as acts having

“intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

Therefore, I will refer to the event as genocide.

As we commemorate this act of genocide, we should look at the causes and consequences of this act by the Soviet state, which is perhaps a lesson in history. In the aftermath of the first world war, Ukraine established the independent Ukrainian People’s Republic in January 1918. For three years, the new republic fought the Bolshevik red army, but, ultimately, it lost the struggle and was subordinated to become part of the Soviet Union.

Under Vladimir Lenin, Ukraine gained a small degree of economic freedom, following resistance from local farmers to the forcible requisitioning of their crops and equipment. However, at the end of the 1920s, Stalin was dictator of the Soviet Union and he feared Ukrainian cultural autonomy and the possibility of an independence movement arising there. So began a crackdown on Ukrainian peasants, intellectuals and cultural elites. Widespread intimidation, arrests and imprisonment followed. Thousands of intellectuals, church leaders and Communist Party members were executed.

Stalin then declared a new five-year plan, which included the collectivisation of agriculture, giving the state control over grain supplies for export and local distribution. Grain exports were supposed to fund the Soviet Union to become a massive industrial power. History records some 4,000 local rebellions against collectivisation and the terror that was then unleashed. Tens of thousands of farmers were arrested; they were either shot or sent to labour camps. The wealthier and more successful farmers—the kulaks—were stripped of everything that they owned and eliminated as a class. They were either executed or deported far away.

That horror that was unleashed by Stalin set the stage for the ultimate horror of the Holodomor. Unrealistically high grain quotas were set, which were accompanied by measures to wipe out significant numbers of the population of the Ukrainian nation. In August 1932, a decree said that anyone, even a child, who took any produce from a collective field could be shot or imprisoned. Famine escalated and the borders of Ukraine were sealed by the Soviets. More than one third of villages were blacklisted, which was, in effect, a collective death sentence, because the villages were surrounded by troops and residents were prevented from leaving or receiving food supplies.

People ate anything that might be edible, including grass, acorns, cats and dogs—there were even cases of cannibalism. At the height of the Holodomor, in June 1933, 28,000 Ukrainians were dying every day. However, while that was going on, the Soviet Union removed 4.27 million tonnes of grain from Ukraine, which is enough to feed 12 million people for a year. Make no mistake: that was a carefully calculated and methodical extermination of millions of people by a ruthless and bloody-handed Soviet Government. It was not done out of ignorance or any kind of administrative confusion, or by local officials without the knowledge and instruction of the central Government—the Soviet secret police, its military intelligence agency the GRU, and the red army were fully deployed.

At the time of that genocide, the Soviet Union denied that there was a famine and rejected offers of foreign aid. It was the 1980s before people could speak openly about that terrible period of history. Few journalists wrote about it at the time and it is poorly reported even now. Significantly, the current Russian Federation has admitted that there were famines in the 1930s but has not admitted the deliberate nature of the manufactured and artificial famine in Ukraine in 1932-33.

That was a very brief history of the Holodomor. It is important that we remember those atrocities, because humanity forgets such events all too quickly, particularly if they do not happen close to home.

Earlier in my speech, I mentioned the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which shows that Russia seems to have learned nothing. The capacity for barbarism—like that Russia inflicted in 1932-33—does not seem to have changed. The atrocities that Russian armed forces have perpetrated on civilians and prisoners of war alike are well documented and well evidenced. It is difficult to see how it is possible that, even after 90 years, there has been no civilising growth in Russia and no development of a better level of humanity and of respect for people’s lives, particularly in the neighbouring nations.

It seems at the moment not only that Russia is prepared to sacrifice the people of Ukraine for the desires of its new tsar, but that there is no limit on the number of Russia’s own people who must also pay the price. It is an utterly pointless war with no clear endgame. Aggression must not be allowed to pay.

The long-standing links between the people of Ukraine and Scotland were shown in 2017 with the installation of the eternal memory stone on Edinburgh’s Calton hill. That stone was dedicated by the Ukrainian community in Scotland, to commemorate the genocide of the forced famine in Ukraine in 1932-33. Those links were further enhanced by the recent formation of the parliamentary cross-party group on Ukraine. I am honoured to be the convener of that group and look forward to seeing a further strengthening of the relationship between the two countries.

On 25 November, we should all reflect on the atrocities that have gone before and those that we see now. I end with a simple call for us to join with the people of Ukraine, particularly those who have made their homes among us as a result of the current war, in commemorating the genocide of the Holodomor and in working together to ensure that such events can never happen again.

17:18  

I congratulate my colleague Colin Beattie on bringing this timely debate to the chamber.

We debated this topic just over nine years ago, in 2014, which was the year in which Russia illegally annexed Crimea. In my speech then, I said that 25 countries officially recognised the Holodomor as a deliberate act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. That list of countries has now grown to 34. It includes Germany, France and the United States. The United Kingdom Government has said that it would refer to the event as genocide only following a determination by a competent court. Recently, the Welsh Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution, Mick Antoniw MS, unequivocally declared the Holodomor to be an act of genocide. I urge the Scottish Government to follow suit.

Genocide can refer to a range of acts committed with the intent of destroying a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. There is no doubt that the Ukrainian Holodomor was such a case. During the Russian revolution, Ukrainians declared an independent Ukrainian People’s Republic in January 1918. In 1921, that was forcibly incorporated as a Soviet republic, bar a few provinces that were taken over by Poland.

That did not stop nascent movements of cultural liberalisation, nationalism and intellectualism. In fact, Ukrainian language use in education, the mass media and Government was actively promoted by the Soviet authorities in the 1920s. However, in the late 1920s, Joseph Stalin’s Bolsheviks sought to eradicate Ukraine’s perceived intellectual and cultural elites and its very national identity. Stalin initiated mass-scale political repression through widespread arrests, imprisonment and execution. Thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals, church leaders and Ukrainian Communist Party functionaries who supported pro-Ukrainian policies were shot. Subsequently, in the great purge, their replacements who did not support pro-Ukrainian policies were also shot.

Concurrently, Stalin proceeded with the collectivisation of agriculture to fund Soviet industrialisation. Self-sufficient landowning peasants resisted collectivisation but had their belongings seized and were then executed or deported to Siberia in appalling conditions.

In Ukraine, a famine was engineered by setting grain quotas so high that they were impossible to achieve. When the devastating effects of the famine became clear, the regime intensified rather than reversed its policy. As Colin Beattie pointed out, the five stalks of grain decree declared that anyone—even a child—caught taking produce from a collective field could be shot or imprisoned for stealing socialist property. Fleeing the country was impossible, with the border effectively sealed.

No one knows how many died—from 3.5 million to 7 million, out of a population of just over 31 million in 1930, with some provinces losing more than a third of their people. At the height of the Holodomor, 28,000 Ukrainians were dying every day. People resorted to eating wild animals and pets and, in some cases, cannibalism. Meanwhile, Moscow rejected aid from abroad and grain rotted in warehouses. The repercussions became especially bad in rural Ukraine, Kuban and other areas of high Ukrainian ethnicity, as well as in Kazakhstan.

In the 1926 census, the Kuban population was 3.4 million, of whom almost half—49.2 per cent—were Ukrainian and about 1.4 million were Russian. Other figures from the same census show that Ukrainian speakers made up 55 per cent of the population. However, by the 2002 Russian census, only 2 per cent of the population spoke Ukrainian and fewer than 1 per cent were noted as being ethnically Ukrainian. That is because, after the famine subsided, settlers were brought into Ukraine from Russia.

In 1953, the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” to provide a legal concept for the Nazi holocaust, asserted that the Holodomor was

“perhaps the classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification—the destruction of the Ukrainian nation.”

Lemkin said that, because there were so many Ukrainians, the Soviets could not kill them all. Instead, the genocide consisted of four steps: extermination of the Ukrainian national elite; liquidation of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church; destruction of a significant part of Ukraine’s peasantry as custodians of traditions, folklore, music, national language and literature; and populating the territory with Russians to eventually dissolve Ukrainian national identity.

Genocide is a complex process that targets institutions, culture and economic existence, and not necessarily their immediate destruction. In the context of the on-going illegal invasion of Ukraine by the Soviet Union’s de facto successor, Russia, which Colin Beattie’s motion mentions, Ukrainians in Scotland and compatriots and relatives in Ukraine would welcome the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government unequivocally declaring that the Holodomor was, indeed, genocide.

17:23  

It seems quite extraordinary in terms of scheduling that we have moved from events in the middle east, which so terrify and appal us, to the commemoration of events in Ukraine, visited currently by fresh conflict from Russia, which intimidate and terrify us all over again. It is extraordinary that some 7 million people died long before the events of the Holocaust, a decade later. There were two Holocausts, if you like—genocides of respective peoples, one by fascists and one by Bolsheviks, with both sides claiming to have been on the right side of history. I call that a lazy phrase, because only history can judge those things. Ultimately, history did not favour either the Bolsheviks or the fascists.

The figure is quite extraordinary: 7 million people. The Holocaust that was visited upon the Jewish population was of Jews from the continent over—and indeed, beyond. The Holodomor was visited on the population of a single country—the working agricultural, rural workforce, which was effectively starved to death by a kind of collectivist nonsense promulgated by the Soviet, blinkered mentality of how an agricultural, agrarian community should operate, which simply led, by greater and greater degrees, to the deaths of so many.

There were higher and higher quotas that could not be fulfilled, the repatriation to the land of anybody who sought to leave, and the confiscation of the very seeds that were needed to establish and achieve a higher grain yield in the subsequent year. It was effectively a death sentence to be left to try to meet the theoretical nonsense of the Bolshevik Soviets in those ghastly years, and so many starved to death.

For decades afterwards, there was a denial of those things, and there still is. Although there is absolute condemnation of Hitler and Nazism across the world—albeit, unfortunately, there are those somewhere on the extreme far right who will still look to the Nazis—there is still sometimes a wider sympathy for Stalin. There is an effort to rehabilitate him slightly in Putin’s Russia, where some of the statues are going back up, yet that man was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions across what was his own country—never mind anyone else’s—and this appalling atrocity that was visited on the people there.

The Prime Minister visited Ukraine last year, in the run-up to the commemoration of the Holodomor.

There has been some debate about whether or not the Holodomor was a genocide. In the debate that took place in the House of Commons, my colleague David Mundell said:

“how would the UK’s standing be diminished in any way by recognising the holodomor as a genocide?”—[Official Report, House of Commons, 25 May 2023; Vol 733, c 519.]

I completely associate myself with those sentiments. I think that we can—not happily, but collectively—agree that it was a genocide visited on the people of Ukraine, and we see, with ghastly symbolism and symmetry, a shocking conflict visited upon them yet again. President Zelensky said:

“Once they wanted to destroy us with hunger, now, with darkness and cold”,

and with bombs and weapons, but the people of Ukraine will not forget and the world will not forget their actions.

The motion refers to events across our own country that are offering support. I pay tribute to the communities in Clarkston and Giffnock in my constituency that have worked so hard to make Ukrainian refugees here feel welcome. That will be the story of every member across the chamber.

It is so depressing that, in a single day in this Parliament, in this era, all these years later, we have had to debate two conflicts that have caused so much pain in the past and continue to cause so much pain and suffering today. The Holodomor was a genocide and, 90 years on, we should recognise and remember it as such.

17:27  

I will open with an echo of what Jackson Carlaw has just said. It is an astonishing day in this Parliament for us to be talking about events that are happening literally as we stand here and speak, and about events that happened not far shy of 100 years ago so close to us on this continent. I extend my compliments and thanks to Colin Beattie for bringing this debate to the chamber and for the huge amount of work that he does in the cross-party group on Ukraine to show the support that exists in the chamber and across Scotland for Ukraine.

I pause to wonder whether we need to rehearse the true atrocity of the instance that we are talking about, which has been so perfectly, graphically and importantly reminded to the chamber. If I may contradict Colin Beattie on one small point, I am not sure whether the Holodomor is unknown in Scotland. The Ukrainians who reside here—those who have been forced to due to current events and those who came here further back in history—rightly remind the communities that they live in of the importance of that matter. However, the important act of remembrance that happened in 2017 on Calton Hill should be more widely known about—I absolutely agree with that.

Things such as our debate this evening and members of this Parliament going out and speaking to their communities about the Holodomor or being present when Ukrainians in their communities speak about it send a powerful message about why it should be remembered for what it was—an attempt to destroy a nation by a small group of individuals taking decisions about millions of people’s lives.

When I look at what is happening in Ukraine today and look back to the 2014 invasion of Crimea, which has already been mentioned, I do not think that it is about the Russians or Russia; it is about appalling leaders of that nation, and particularly the way that Putin wants to destroy Ukraine because of an appalling, misguided belief in some historic, greater Soviet Union. Ukrainians reside in a country that has a right to govern itself, and it speaks to their pride that they are standing up to Putin and his appalling leaders, who are forcing the deaths of thousands of people.

It is right that, on 25 November, we remember the Holodomor, which still echoes today, all these years later. As we heard in our debate earlier this afternoon, it is important that politicians, who seek to lead and speak for communities, address things now. We cannot just expect people to put things right in the future. It is our responsibility to do better, whether in our tiny communities, in our country, on our continent or across the world. It is sad that it perhaps takes such events to remind us of that, but the hopeful aspect is perhaps that they force us not to turn away from the really difficult decisions that we need to take going forward—decisions that require discussions to happen.

In the Holodomor, upwards of 7 million people paid the price. Since then, millions of others have paid the price. Perhaps it is time for politicians to remember that what they do should be done for their communities and that we have, to echo the words of Jo Cox, more in common than that which divides us.

17:32  

I thank Colin Beattie for his work on the cross-party group on Ukraine and for bringing this important debate to the Parliament. I also thank the other speakers for their contributions.

I first learned about the Holodomor from my good friend and former MSP Stefan Tymkewycz. To the best of my knowledge, at that time, Stef was my only Ukrainian friend, but I now have many Ukrainian friends. I thank the diaspora of Ukrainian people, a number of whom who are in the public gallery, for bringing an exhibition about the Holodomor to the Parliament about six years ago in order to inform MSPs and help them to understand what happened to their families and their country. Given the comments that we have heard about the importance of raising awareness, I think that it is time that we had that exhibition back. I would be more than happy to work with people to ensure that that happens sometime soon.

Around that time, I was lucky enough to visit Canada and the United States with the then Presiding Officer, Ken Macintosh, and we went to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. It is the first museum in the world that is solely dedicated to the evolution, celebration and future of human rights, and visiting it is a profound experience. It has a gallery called the breaking the silence gallery, which contains exhibitions that remember, commemorate and inform people about the genocides of the world. The Holodomor was included there because Canada recognises it as a genocide, as the UK should. It has been mentioned that today has been a very impactful one in the Parliament, with our thinking about Palestine and Gaza. I pray that Palestine and Gaza do not end up in that gallery and that something can be done to bring peace there, too.

The breaking the silence gallery includes a 10-minute film that shows footage from Ukraine at the time of the Holodomor, including some of the propaganda posters from the Soviets that denied that there was any problem in Ukraine. Colin Beattie has laid out the situation around that very well. We must thank journalists such as Malcolm Muggeridge, who worked for the Manchester Guardian then. At great risk to himself, he defied the Soviets, went into Ukraine, and brought back real reports about what was happening on the ground there. That was a real testimony to what was happening in Ukraine. Unfortunately, that did not suit some of the political systems here at the time, and the Soviets were still moving towards being considered allies after world war two. Many people here denied what happened in the Holodomor, but we should not do so today.

I mentioned my friends from the Ukrainian diaspora. I know many of Stefan Tymkewycz’s family now, and I was very pleased to host a Ukrainian Institute exhibition that showed how the current conflict is trying to destroy every part of Ukrainian culture, from theatres to churches, and trying to stop the language being spoken.

A few years ago, I took part in a culture summit with Jonathan Mills on a special Ukrainian day. Funnily enough, invitations from friends from the Ukrainian Institute that invite me to a conference on cultural diplomacy in early December have recently dropped into my inbox. At that time, we talked a lot about what Scotland could do to preserve and help Ukrainian culture. I ask the minister to consider and talk with me about how we might take our culture to Ukraine and bring more Ukrainian culture here.

I have many friends in the displaced Ukrainian community here. Some are from Ukrainian Ballet Freedom, and we met some of them when our committee was doing work with displaced Ukrainians. There are also friends who have settled and are very welcome in my constituency.

It is nearly two years since the atrocities started. Tonight, I say to our friends in the gallery:

“Ukraine’s glory has not yet perished, nor her freedom,
Upon us, brother Ukrainians, fate shall smile once more.
Our enemies will vanish like dew in the morning sun,
And we too shall rule, brothers, in a free land of our own.”

Slava Ukraini!

17:37  

I thank Colin Beattie for bringing this debate to the chamber.

We must always remember and continue to learn the lessons from one of the cruellest and most horrifying human rights violations in history. The monumental nature of the afternoon that we have had in our Parliament has not been lost on me, as it has not been on Jackson Carlaw. It always makes me feel proud of the Parliament when we join together as we do in situations such as this.

Members have made many points, and I want to pick up on all of them, if I can. I will pick up on the point about genocide at the end of my comments.

Colin Beattie eloquently described what happened in the Holodomor. Everybody has given a meaningful contribution, and we have all been given an opportunity to acknowledge and remember the victims of the Holodomor. Colin Beattie talked about grain, the need for which is such a basic need. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs would have grain sitting there as a key platform—food is what people need. Enough grain to feed 12 million people for a year was removed in the Holodomor, which resulted in famine.

Colin Beattie mentioned the cross-party group on Ukraine, which I was delighted to hear about. It will meet on 5 December, and I look forward to seeing how it will work not just to recognise Ukrainians in Scotland but to live up to the oath that we have all taken today to remember what happened in the Holodomor. I wish Colin Beattie, the cross-party group and everyone involved in it my best.

One aspect of remembrance is the memorial stone at Calton Hill. If members have not been up to see it, I urge them to do so and to take a moment of quiet reflection to understand what happened.

Kenneth Gibson said in his speech that Stalin was erasing the culture of the Ukrainian people and that a hungry child could be shot for taking grain that, in some cases, had rotted away. Jackson Carlaw said in his speech that 7 million people in a single country effectively starved to death, which was denied for decades. We all recognise the deep generational hurt and trauma that were caused by that denial, and we should never allow the Holodomor to go back into the shadows.

Martin Whitfield said that we should raise awareness. I am pleased that all the speeches in the debate did that and that the Scottish Parliament has a great record of doing that. We should always remember, we should always raise awareness and we should always use our words and our privileged position to do that at every opportunity.

One thing that struck me about Martin Whitfield’s speech was that he said that hope should not allow us to turn away. Sometimes, in the darkest of days, there is a pinnacle of light—and that is hope. We should keep it alive in everything that we do.

I would never turn down an invitation from my dear friend Clare Adamson to take part in any of her work, and I will be more than happy to accept her invitation. She said that we have many Ukrainian friends, and I have made new friends from the families that we have looked after over the past year or so. My thoughts every day are with one of my friends from my old Council of Europe days, Oleksandr Senkevych, who is the mayor of Mykolaiv and who, quite frankly, has kept that city running. We will keep them all in our hearts due to the situation that they face.

On the issue of defining genocide, there is no doubt that there are many requirements and issues. I was glad to hear about David Mundell’s challenge to the United Kingdom Government. I also offer that challenge. Although we recognise that the Holodomor was a horrific situation for the Ukrainian people, it remains the Scottish Government’s position that a judicial body, not a Government, should make that determination. If the UK Government and its courts want to do that in an international context, we would be happy to look at that. However, that in no way detracts from our recognition of the appalling tragedy of the Holodomor and its importance to the history of Ukraine and the people of Ukraine.

Today, of all days, we have expressed in the chamber our solidarity with the people of Ukraine who suffered and lost loved ones in that man-made famine. The Scottish Government recognises the pain and suffering that the Holodomor caused and its continued impact on Ukraine and the Ukrainian community, including those who have chosen to make Scotland their home, who, I hope, have felt our warm Scottish welcome.

We welcome the tireless efforts of the Ukrainian consulate, the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain and all those who keep alive the memory of those who lost their lives in the Holodomor.

It is deeply concerning that the 90th anniversary of the Holodomor coincides with Russia’s on-going aggression towards Ukraine and its attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. The memories of that tragedy are all too vivid, with Russia once again choosing the path of terror and the humanitarian crisis that the war has caused.

Scotland condemns in the strongest possible terms Russia’s illegal war against Ukraine, and we stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. We continue to stand for democracy, human rights and the rule of law at home and abroad, and we continue to offer our on-going support to Ukrainians in Scotland. I am proud of the Scottish Government’s work, including the work that took place during my time as equalities minister, to help to ensure that everyone in our society can live with human dignity and enjoy their rights in full.

Reflecting on the human tragedy of the Holodomor reinforces why it is so important that the UK remains fully committed to the European convention on human rights and that it does not become an outlier like Russia and Belarus by leaving the 70-year-old treaty that protects our human rights and political freedoms. We know that the international community’s support is vital to help Ukraine to win the war and secure longer-term peace and stability in Europe. We must continue to provide that support for as long as it is needed.

Over a number of generations, Scotland has gained the well-deserved reputation of being a welcoming, tolerant and inclusive country. We defend vigorously the rights of our citizens. We also welcome citizens from Ukraine and beyond, who bring a rich diversity to our communities and create a vibrant and dynamic country. As part of our on-going solidarity with Ukraine, we will continue to support displaced people from Ukraine to settle well in Scotland, and we will continue to do what we can to provide that warm future and the support to build a new life here. In Scotland, just as in Ukraine, we seek to understand and learn from the past in order to shape a better future.

I close by paying tribute to the people who continue to work to keep alive the memory of those who died in the Holodomor. Many are in the public gallery, but many others are not here today. It was a horrific, man-made disaster of unimaginable scale.

The Scottish Government stands with Ukraine today. Slava Ukraini! [Applause.]

Meeting closed at 17:45.