Failures on the battlefields forced the Kremlin to seek more hideous means for mass atrocities, unsurprisingly their choice fell on the theft of grain and destruction of Ukrainian harvests.
The deliberate policy aimed at starving people of food is neither new nor unacceptable for Moscow. In 1932-33, British journalist Gareth Jones revealed to the Western public the truth about the Holodomor in Ukraine. Despite the artificial famine, Stalin managed to continue trade and relations with European countries.

The threat of militarisation on the European continent obscured the death of millions of people in Ukraine from hunger. The results of WWII allowed the Communists to avoid responsibility and to hide the horrors of genocide in Ukraine for decades to come. The blueprint for famine, though, has been preserved in the State Archive of the Russian Federation and in the minds of Russian political elites.
Bohdan Bernatskyi
Future of Ukraine Fellow
Bohdan Bernatskyi is a Visegrad Insight Fellow as of 2022. As a Senior Lecturer at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (and Ostroh Academy) he teaches Diplomatic Law, Public International Law, Countermeasures and Law of Treaties. In 2019, he defended PhD thesis on banning political parties in Ukraine and abroad. Since then, Bohdan has become a member of the Parliamentary working group on reforming party legislation in Ukraine.
Bohdan serves as an independent Legal Consultant at Project Expedite Justice (2022-currently), Future of Ukraine Fellow at Visegrad Insight (2022-currently). He was a Legal Adviser to Ukrainian MPs (2020-2022), and Democracy Reporting International (2015-2019).
His professional track of record includes thorough expertise in the fields of sanctions and transitional justice initiatives. He is the author of the complex changes to Ukrainian sanctions infrastructure which aimed at converging UA foreign policy tools to EU best practices. Given EU candidate status to Ukraine, the idea to deepen cooperation within EU-UA CFSP, including sanctions, will gain more currency.
Bohdan participated as an Independent Expert in the transitional reform group launched by the Ministry of Reintegration of Ukraine. All efforts related to building solutions for sustainable peaceful reintegration of the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine was brutally interrupted by Russia on February 24th, 2022. The aftermath of the war will require harder approaches to transitional measures and Bohdan will contribute to this development.
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