A Russian drone killed a man driving his car in Kharkiv Oblast. The strike hit a Peugeot on the Zolochiv-Maksymivka road near the village of Berezivka in Bohodukhiv raion on the evening of 14 July, killing the 61-year-old driver, the Kharkiv Oblast Prosecutor's Office said on Telegram. The drone was preliminarily identified as a Molniya.

The precise hit on the moving car suggests that the Molniya was piloted in real-time.

In October 2025, a Russian Molniya drone hit a car in the Kupiansk district, wounding a 37-year-old volunteer, and an FPV drone killed two men in another car in the same raion two hours later. Both were classified as war crimes.

Molniya is cheap, common, and now flies itself

The Molniya is among the cheapest weapons in Russia's arsenal. It is a low-cost kamikaze drone built close to the front, reliable and ubiquitous. Russia launches up to ten a day on the Zaporizhzhia axis alone.

Ukraine shot down an AI-equipped Molniya over Zaporizhzhia for the first time on 9 July. The AI variant has no antenna, no operator link, and no emissions for a detector to catch, making electronic warfare useless against it. Ukraine's answer is kinetic interception. Defense Ministry adviser Serhii Beskrestnov has warned that a fiber-optic Molniya is already in testing, which would emit no radio signal at all.

Russia's terror documented

Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office has documented over 11,000 Russian FPV attacks on civilians since 2024, with 2,010 recorded in the first four months of 2026 alone.

The road between Zolochiv and Maksymivka is a public road in a Ukrainian oblast. A man was driving home on it. 

Earlier, a Russian FPV drone killed a 57-year-old hospital worker walking along a road in the same oblast — the last resident of the border village of Tokarivka Druha.

A Russian State Duma deputy declared that destroying up to half of Ukraine's population is acceptable to eradicate what he called "Nazism," the Moscow Times reported. MP Alexei Zhuravlyov made the remarks in a conversation with a blogger. 

As Moscow's all-out war against Ukraine continues, Zhuravlyov's words spell out, in plain terms, the extermination agenda behind Russia's repeated "denazification" claims — the Kremlin accuses Ukrainians of Nazism while its own officials voice openly Nazi-style calls to wipe out a neighboring nation.

"Even fifty percent must be destroyed"

Zhuravlyov spoke in a YouTube interview. When asked how many "Nazis" there are in Ukraine now. Zhuravlyov claimed the figure used to be 2% but may now stand at 20–30%. Asked whether all of them should be destroyed, the deputy answered: "Preferably."

"All Nazis must be destroyed. All of them must be. You understand, if it's fifty—even fifty percent must be destroyed... So that this contagion is not there, so that no one threatens us," Zhuravlyov stated.

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The deputy claimed he saw "with his own eyes" how "these creatures come and hang everyone—Russians, non-Russians, regardless of your views." He offered no evidence. He insisted that "if this contagion is not uprooted from there, it will remain forever."

Kill criterion: a weapon in hand

Zhuravlyov allowed that some Ukrainians might switch sides—"change their views.". Those who refuse, he said, "must be destroyed, of course." Asked how to tell a "fascist" from a "non-fascist," the parliamentarian named the main criterion—defending their land with a weapon.

"If he has an assault rifle—yes, he must be destroyed. Why tell him apart? See him—kill him," he stated.

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Expulsion or death for those who won't recant

To back his claim that Ukrainians would quickly change their position, Zhuravlyov cited a phrase he attributed to a—possibly non-existent—"native Ukrainian": 

"Lviv has never yet met a single army in the world without bread and salt." 

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He then repeated that those who refuse to change their views should be killed or deported. 

"If you don't want to switch sides—you must be either expelled from there or destroyed," he said.

A script written in 2022

Zhuravlyov's formula—re-educate some, expel or kill the rest—repeats the program Russian state media laid out at the start of the full-scale invasion. In April 2022, the Kremlin-controlled agency RIA Novosti published a manifesto declaring that "denazification will inevitably be de-Ukrainization," a text Yale historian Timothy Snyder called a "genocide handbook." In that document, as in the deputy's interview, "Nazi" simply means Ukrainian.

Russia's massive combined missile and drone attack overnight on 6 July killed civilians and wrecked several apartment buildings across Kyiv, Ukrainian officials reported. Air defenses stopped nearly all cruise missiles and most drones but intercepted none of the ballistic and Zircon missiles. The capital declared a day of mourning while rescuers kept digging through damaged high-rises.

Zero ballistic intercepts in a 419-weapon attack

Ukraine's Air Force said its radar units tracked 68 missiles and 351 attack drones during the night. The salvo included 23 Iskander-M and S-400 ballistic missiles, six Zircon/Oniks anti-ship missiles, 33 Kh-101 cruise missiles, and six Kalibr cruise missiles. Kyiv was the main target.

By 08:30, the defenders had downed or suppressed 363 targets. They stopped all six Kalibrs, 31 of 33 Kh-101s, and 326 drones. Not one ballistic or Zircon missile fell to an interceptor. The Air Force recorded 29 ballistic missile impacts and 18 drone hits at 34 locations, plus falling debris at 16 more.

Ukraine's Defense Ministry appealed to nearly 40 partner countries just four days earlier to urgently release Patriot interceptors. Those missiles remain the only reliable answer to Russian ballistic weapons.

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11 dead in Kyiv, three children among the hospitalized

Kyiv Mayor Vitalii Klitschko reported that the Russian attack killed at least 11 people in the city. One wounded man died in the hospital in the morning. The strike injured 46 people, and medics hospitalized 27 of them, including three children. Prosecutors opened another war-crime investigation over the deaths.

Four city districts took damage, with Podilskyi hit hardest. One nine-story building there lost its apartments from the fifth floor to the ninth. The State Emergency Service said rescuers walked 17 people out of that building and brought 28 more down by fire ladder. City authorities earlier reported two dead and 22 rescued at a 25-story Darnytskyi building that debris struck at the fourth-floor level.

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Klitschko added that Russian weapons hit residential high-rises in Darnytskyi district too. A fire broke out in a 25-story building, where the attack destroyed apartments between the second and fifth floors. Falling debris set apartments burning on the 23rd through 25th floors of a 30-story complex, and a garage cooperative nearby caught fire, rescuers reported. A warehouse burned in Obolonskyi district, and crews also worked in Holosiivskyi.

Day of mourning and rerouted trains

Klitschko announced that 7 July would be a Day of Mourning in Kyiv. Flags on all municipal buildings drop to half-mast, and the city banned entertainment events. The search operation in Podilskyi and Darnytskyi districts continued, with people possibly still under the rubble.

National railway operator Ukrzaliznytsia said the State Emergency Service restricted train movement on some Kyiv Oblast sections for safety reasons. Five long-distance trains switched to backup detour routes with all key stops preserved but delays expected. Suburban traffic in the Fastiv direction also suffered, so shuttle buses now link Boiarka with Kyiv.

One killed in Kyiv Oblast, a baby girl among the wounded

Head of the Kyiv Oblast Military Administration Mykola Kalashnyk reported that the attack killed one person in Bucha district. By 7:30, 15 residents of the oblast had been hurt, with 11 in hospitals, among them a nine-month-old girl. The strikes damaged detached houses, businesses, and other civilian sites across Bucha, Vyshhorod, and Brovary districts.

The most dangerous situation developed in Vyshneve, where unexploded ordnance threatened secondary detonation. Police cordoned off the strike site, and the city council urged residents and businesses to stay in shelters and off the streets until the all-clear.

Drones wound a man in Odesa

Russia attacked Odesa city in southern Ukraine with strike drones the same night. Head of the Odesa Oblast Military Administration Oleh Kiper said the attack injured a 23-year-old man, who received medical care. The drones damaged multi-story residential buildings, a parking facility with garages, and a detached house that caught fire.

Head of the City Military Administration Serhii Lysak noted that five detached houses and a dormitory took damage in Kyivskyi district. Crews restored the tram tracks, and public transport kept running.

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President Volodymyr Zelenskyy publicly warned on 5 July that Russia was preparing a new massive strike. Russia's previous mass attack on the capital killed 31 people and injured over a hundred.

Bodies returned from Russia to Ukraine sometimes contain explosives. Ukrainian police have repeatedly found explosive devices and grenades during initial inspection of remains returned by Russia, said Taras Tarasenko, head of crimes against life and health investigations at Kirovohrad Oblast Main Police Department, in an interview with Ukrinform.

The finding extends a documented pattern of Russian misconduct in body returns since Ukraine and Russia began large-scale repatriation under the June 2025 Istanbul talks. The most recent transfer brought 522 bodies on 18 June 2026, with full forensic identification of each repatriated body taking around 14 months due to the condition in which remains arrive.

Former Ukraine's Military Intelligence chief and current Head of Presidential Office Kyrylo Budanov previously characterized Russia's handling of fallen Ukrainian soldiers as "dirty games."

Initial inspection routinely checks for explosive devices

After repatriated bodies arrive in Ukraine, police conduct an initial inspection with the first priority being to check whether the remains carry items that could be dangerous, Tarasenko told the journalists.

"Such cases have been repeated. We found explosive devices, grenades, and other things, so we work as carefully as possible," Tarasenko said.

In parallel, investigators search for personal items that can help identify the fallen soldier, such as documents, mobile phones, dog tags, and bank cards. Detailed examination follows, with investigators recording and photographing distinguishing marks, tattoos, clothing, and other details.

Mixed remains require segmentation, DNA expertise

Police also report that repatriated remains are sometimes found mixed with the bones and tissue of multiple individuals returned as one body. Visual inspection and DNA expertise identify these cases.

Then, law enforcement and forensic medical experts conduct segmentation to separate the remains for further investigation.

Previously, Russia has been caught hiding its own war dead in handovers by sending back remains in Ukrainian uniforms with Ukrainian dog tags, possibly to dodge compensation owed to Russian soldiers' families. Ukrainian families have also reported bodies returning with missing internal organs. 

The Ukrainian police in the Kherson Oblast have notified a Crimean resident of suspicion in connection with the illegal removal of rare animals from the Askania-Nova biosphere reserve. The damage from the crimes exceeds $1.5 million.

Occupation enables trafficking

Following Russia’s seizure of parts of Kherson Oblast, the Askania-Nova biosphere reserve came under occupation control and was placed under an unlawfully appointed administration. Investigators say a 58-year-old founder of a Yalta-based zoo and lion park entered into agreements with this administration to facilitate the removal and transfer of animals.

Before Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine, the Askania-Nova Biosphere Reserve, established by German Friedrich Falz-Fein in 1898, was one of the most popular tourist destinations in Ukraine. It attracted visitors from all over the world with its stunning landscapes and unique wildlife.

Investigators document transfers

Law enforcement agencies report at least three coordinated transport operations in 2024 that moved animals from the reserve to occupied Crimea. These operations included:

• Three grey Ukrainian cattle valued at approximately $93,600
• Three Chapman’s zebras valued at approximately $423,000
• Seven additional Chapman’s zebras valued at approximately $980,000

In total, authorities say ten Chapman’s zebras and three cattle were removed, resulting in overall damages of approximately $1.5 million.

Investigators describe the case as a structured scheme involving repeated logistical coordination between the suspect and the occupation authorities.

Authorities file charges

The suspect has been charged in absentia under Part 2 of Article 28 and Part 1 of Article 438 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, covering violations of the laws and customs of war committed in conspiracy.

The Kherson Regional Prosecutor’s Office is overseeing the proceedings, while investigative actions continue to establish the full scope of involvement and additional participants.

Officials stress that Askania-Nova, one of Ukraine’s most significant conservation sites, remains protected under international humanitarian law despite occupation conditions.

A Russian strike killed two Norwegian People's Aid deminers and wounded four others in Kherson Oblast on 24 June, the group said. The team was clearing mines from Ukrainian farmland when the strike hit. Ukrainian prosecutors opened a war-crimes investigation.

Russia has turned Ukraine into the world's most mined country, contaminating tens of thousands of square kilometers of farmland that only a few thousand clearance workers can slowly make safe—work measured in decades, not years.

A strike at midday on a demining team

The strike hit at about 12:50 p.m. near the village of Novopetrivka, in the Vysokopillia community, Norwegian People's Aid said. One worker was killed at the scene, and a colleague taken to hospital later died of wounds. Four others were wounded, two in serious condition as doctors fought to save their lives.

The dead and wounded were all Ukrainian nationals, the group said. A 24-year-old demining specialist was among those killed, the head of Kherson Oblast Military Administration, Oleksandr Prokudin, reported. The team had been clearing land of mines and unexploded ordnance, a basic condition for farmers to return to their fields and for displaced people to come home.

"Military authorities in Kherson report through Ukrainian media that Norwegian People's Aid was struck by a Russian Iskander‑M missile. The organization is still working to verify this information and the exact circumstances surrounding the attack," the organization wrote in its press release.

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A war-crimes case

Viktoriya Fedotova, head of the Ukrainian NGO Martin-Club and a partner of the demining team, wrote that the workers had taken no part in combat. They were clearing Ukrainian soil so civilians could be safe, she said, and her own team had trained alongside the dead only recently. Attacking those who save lives and make land safe is a gross violation of international humanitarian law, she added.

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A usual day of Russian strikes across the oblast

Across Kherson Oblast over the preceding 24 hours, Russian drones and artillery hit Kherson city and dozens of settlements, the regional administration reported. The strikes killed two people while wounding 16. 

By late afternoon on 24 June, prosecutors had logged one civilian killed and 11 wounded across the oblast from artillery, mortars, drones, and a ballistic strike. A drone hit a civilian fuel station around 5 p.m., seriously wounding two people.

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The strikes continued the next morning.

• On 25 June, prosecutors opened a fresh war-crimes case over drone attacks on a city hospital and a utility worker.
• Around 8 a.m., a drone strike on the Kherson hospital wounded five of its medical and technical staff.
• At 9:10 a.m., a drone wounded a 63-year-old utility worker in the Korabelnyi district, and just before 11 a.m. another strike hurt a 61-year-old man in the same district.
• A 62-year-old woman was hospitalized with blast and head injuries from a Shahed strike in the Central district the day before, and a 16-year-old boy needed care for a blast injury from another drone strike there.
• A 60-year-old woman and a man sought help after a drone hit their car between Bilozerka and Pryozerne.

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A pattern of strikes on those who help

UN investigators have previously ruled Russia's deliberate drone hunting of Kherson's civilians and rescuers a crime against humanity, tracing the campaign up the chain of command. Russian forces have hit humanitarian deminers before: in September 2025, a Russian missile killed two workers and wounded five from a Danish Refugee Council clearance team near Chernihiv, in northern Ukraine.

A Russian drone strike in Sumy Oblast on 22 June killed a 13-year-old boy, his 36-year-old father, and his 73-year-old grandmother, the Regional Prosecutor's Office reports. The boy's 31-year-old mother, his 10-year-old brother, and his 13-year-old sister survived the strike with injuries.

The strike killed three members of one family across three generations in a single drone attack on their home. 

Znob-Novhorodske lies in northern Sumy Oblast near the Russian border. The community has been repeatedly struck by Russian forces since the start of the full-scale war in 2022.

Ukrainian prosecutors open war crimes investigation under Article 438

"Prosecutors, in coordination with other law enforcement officials, are documenting the consequences of the attack," the Sumy Oblast Prosecutor's Office said.

Ukraine opened a pre-trial investigation into the commission of war crimes that resulted in the death of people, which is Part 2, Article 438 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.

Article 438 of Ukraine's Criminal Code implements provisions of the Geneva Conventions in Ukrainian domestic law. Direct attacks on civilian objects, including residential homes occupied by civilians, are prohibited under the Fourth Geneva Convention and Additional Protocol I.

Sumy Oblast border communities endure sustained Russian attacks

Russian forces have repeatedly targeted civilian infrastructure across Sumy Oblast. A Russian glide bomb killed a 69-year-old woman in a Shostka apartment block on 3 April 2026. A Russian drone killed a grain-truck driver in Sumy Oblast on 16 March 2026, with police opening war-crimes proceedings under Article 438 for each strike.

Previously, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine reported that at least 274 civilians were killed and 1,763 were injured last month, which is a 93 percent increase compared with May 2025 and a 23 percent increase over April 2026. 

The investigators say the use of fire weapons by Russia in urban areas of Ukraine was the main driver of the high casualty toll. 

Ukraine's Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko has reviewed the work of his office across his first year in the role. He published infographics on Telegram, counting the crimes of Russia's invasion alongside the office's work on corruption, child protection, and asset recovery at home. 

A year measured against the war

Since June 2025, Ukrainian prosecutors registered and began investigating 72,295 crimes linked to Russia's aggression. Of those, 68,900 are war crimes. Investigators served suspicion notices on 349 people and sent 258 cases to court. Courts have handed down 97 guilty verdicts so far.

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Chasing wartime corruption

Kravchenko's office also pursued fraud far from the front. In the state budget sphere, prosecutors established 14 billion hryvnias ($312 million) in damages and sent over 2,000 indictments to court. In defense, they filed 408 lawsuits worth 42.6 billion hryvnias ($949 million) and recovered 3.6 billion hryvnias ($80 million) for the state.

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Returning assets, arming the troops

A review of cases against businesses reshaped part of the year's work. Prosecutors identified 26,818 such files and closed 9,716 of them. Pretrial investigations continue in 15,303 proceedings, which prompted 4,263 expert examinations, while 1,867 cases reached court. The office returned over 80 million hryvnias ($1.8 million) in cash, in several currencies, to businesses, along with precious metals, cars, and equipment.

It also transferred funds and property worth more than 1.3 billion hryvnias ($29 million) to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

For months, Russian forces have cordoned off the occupied town of Oleshky. They have blocked roads and emptied pharmacies, all while mining the area. In June, a food truck ran over a landmine at the edge of town, killing a man bringing in aid. Up to 6,000 Ukrainians are still trapped in Oleshky and neighboring villages, more than 180 of them children. The last grocery store shut in January, and for stretches this spring no food reached the town at all. 

Ukraine has seen this before. In its siege of Oleshky, Russia is reviving methods Stalin’s regime used against Ukrainian villages in 1932 and 1933: branding villages "hostile," cutting them off from supplies, barring the starving from leaving, and letting hunger kill the population. That famine—the Holodomor—killed millions. 

Yet as it besieges Oleshky, Russia says the Holodomor never happened. Moscow has dismissed the Holodomor as Western propaganda, rewritten its schoolbooks to blame the famine on the weather, and in occupied Ukraine has torn down the memorials to its dead.

Russia rewrites history in another way too: banning scholars. On 5 January 2026, it barred 28 Canadians from the country. Among them were 16 scholars of the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC) of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta. At the time, they were working on a course about the famine Russia denies.

They released it anyway. Seventy-seven days after the ban, Famine as Genocide: The Holodomor in Ukraine went live on Coursera—13 free modules, built by HREC at the University of Alberta.

What was the Holodomor?

The Holodomor—"murder by starvation"—was a man-made famine that struck Soviet Ukraine between 1932 and 1933. Scholars generally put the death toll at around 3.5 million; some figures go up to 7 million. Most died in the winter of 1932 and the spring and summer of 1933, as Soviet collectivization emptied whole villages.

The 1932 harvest was poor, but Soviet policy turned shortage into catastrophe. Stalin's government set grain quotas the farmers could not meet. Brigades entered the villages and seized what was left, killing those who resisted. Authorities blacklisted villages that fell short, sealing them off from the outside world. When peasants tried to flee to less famine-stricken parts of the USSR, a draconian passport system trapped them inside Ukraine.

One Ukrainian photographer left the famine its starkest visual record. In the spring of 1933, Mykola Bokan shot a near-daily record of the Holodomor from inside his own home in the Chernihiv Oblast. One photograph shows his family at the dining-room table, beneath his caption: "300 days without a single piece of bread to have with our meager lunch!"

Three months later, his son Kostiantyn, one of the gaunt figures in the image, was dead. On 10 July 1933, Bokan gathered his surviving children around a smaller table, a framed portrait of Kostiantyn between them. The caption reads: "Remembrance for Kostia, who died of starvation."

Bokan was arrested for "counter-revolutionary activities." The photographs were among the evidence. He died in the Soviet camp system. His pictures sat in a secret police archive until researchers found them in 2007. They are now part of Famine as Genocide’s evidence. 

Ukraine commemorates the Holodomor each year on the fourth Saturday of November, with a national minute of silence at four o’clock in the afternoon. 

The permanent damage the deniers have to explain away

Russia’s denial now has to contend with a growing body of evidence—including the famine's mark on the bodies of people born long after it ended. 

For decades, the Holodomor was usually told as a story of starvation. The Soviet archives remained locked until the early 1990s, preventing people from obtaining an accurate picture of the Soviet famine. Before that, scholars studying the Holodomor worked from the memories of émigré survivors and the cables foreign diplomats sent to their home countries in 1932-33.

That picture has changed. “Thanks to the amount of research done over the past twelve years, there is now a field called Holodomor studies,” Marta Baziuk, The Holodomor Research and Education Consortium’s (HREC) executive director and one of the course’s builders, told Euromaidan Press. 

HREC’s course broadens that view by tracing the famine’s epigenetic legacy — its lingering physical and psychological effects — among survivors and their descendants.

Research into other man-made famines, especially the Dutch Hunger Winter during World War II, informs this part. In the winter of 1944, German forces blockaded the western Netherlands and cut food supplies to civilians. A 2026 study groups Holodomor descendants with Dutch Hunger Winter and Holocaust survivors, pointing to shared histories of famine, mass deprivation, and inherited trauma. 

Children conceived during the famine showed lasting epigenetic changes. Over sixty years later, the generation affected by famines showed accelerated biological aging and elevated risk of diabetes and heart disease compared to other generations.

Researchers studying three generations of Holodomor survivor families have found stress, mistrust, and food hoarding in grandchildren who never went hungry themselves. They describe it as “living in survival mode.” 

"Russia’s war has made Ukrainian history important to a lot of people. This course might’ve been good before the war, but it would have sat quietly, with less interest." — Baziuk

The targeting of Ukrainians shows up in Soviet death records, Baziuk told Euromaidan Press. Even outside the Ukrainian Soviet republic, and even in mixed villages, ethnic Ukrainians died at noticeably higher rates than their neighbors.

The Executed Renaissance

HREC’s course does not treat the Holodomor in isolation. It situates the famine within a broader Soviet pattern of repression against non-Russian groups, in which physical destruction and material deprivation went hand in hand with the stifling of all culture hostile to Stalinism. 

Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide," called the Holodomor the classic example of “Soviet genocide” in 1953. To him, the famine was one prong of a wider assault on Ukraine’s cultural figures, clergy, the peasantry, and Ukrainian national identity through resettlement with non-Ukrainians.

Over the course of the 1930s, Soviet security services arrested, deported, or executed roughly 30,000 Ukrainian writers, scholars, and clergy.

Ukrainian cultural figures flourished in the 1920s, as the Ukrainian language was more widely promoted, only for Soviet authorities to murder them in the 1930s. Today, Ukrainians remember that generation as the “Executed Renaissance.” 

Many of those killed were themselves committed Communists. In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks had little organic support in Ukraine. They had recruited young, idealistic Ukrainians by promising room for a Ukrainian version of socialism.

Korenizatsia, the Soviet promotion of non-Russian nationalities, had once promised room for Ukrainian culture. Stalin’s Great Turn — the Soviet regime’s late-1920s drive toward forced collectivization and rapid industrialization — crushed that opening. Ukrainian national communists became, at best, relics of a discarded future, and at worst marked for death.

Russia’s present war follows a similar logic. Ukrainian writers are again being killed, as they were in the 1930s. In 2022, Russian forces seized the children’s author Volodymyr Vakulenko near Izium. He is among the more than 100 cultural figures killed by Russia, according to PEN Ukraine. 

In Russian-occupied territory, churches not part of the Moscow Patriarchate have been closed, seized, or destroyed. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have also been forcibly transferred to Russia, where they are to be brought up as Russians. Moscow’s abduction of children has formed the basis for the ICC arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and his children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova. 

Forget what you’ve seen: Soviet-era denial of the Holodomor

Soviet denial began while Ukrainians were still dying. When the International Red Cross offered famine aid, Moscow refused, denying that mass starvation was taking place. Even as Ukraine’s villages became open-air morgues, Soviet ships carried Ukrainian grain out of Odesa for sale on foreign markets.

In March 1933, a young Welsh journalist named Gareth Jones went from village to village in Soviet Ukraine, recounting what he saw:

"There is hunger almost everywhere. Millions die from it. I travelled for several days in Ukraine, and there was no bread. The children had stomachaches, all the horses and cows were dying, and the people were also dying of hunger. The terror was on an unheard-of scale." — Gareth Jones in a letter to his parents, March 1933

For his trouble, Jones was mocked by name in The New York Times. NYT’s Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, responded to Jones in print, denying that any famine existed.

Duranty received more acclaim than Gareth Jones in his lifetime, receiving a Pulitzer Prize in 1932. The Times has since disavowed his coverage, calling his Soviet dispatches "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper." Nevertheless, NYT has yet to return the award.

Jones was banned from the USSR and shot dead two years later in Inner Mongolia, in northern China. He did not live to see his findings vindicated.

Russia’s denial today

Following in Soviet footsteps, Russia continues to whitewash or deny the Holodomor. In 2014, Kremlin-backed outlets called it a “hoax invented by the West’s propaganda machine.” Since 2023, Russian school textbooks have blamed the famine on poor harvests and local mismanagement rather than the Stalinist policies. 

Asked about intent, Baziuk did not treat it as a difficult question. The archives, she says, show Soviet officials knew people were starving and kept selling Ukrainian grain abroad as they died. 

Beyond intimidating scholars, Russia's denial extends to physical destruction. On 19 October 2022, occupation forces in Mariupol dismantled the monument to victims of the Holodomor and political repression near the destroyed Drama Theatre, where up to 600 Ukrainian civilians were killed by a Russian airstrike. The granite, officials said, would be turned into construction materials.

In November 2023, Russian-installed administrators in occupied Kherson Oblast began demolishing Holodomor memorials in Nova Kakhovka and the Oleshky community. They called the memorials "a tool for manipulating history," artificially created to incite hatred toward the Russian Federation.

Echoes of the Past: Russia’s Starvation of Oleshky in 2026

Russia’s destruction has not stopped at memorials. 

In a 25 June report, UN monitors who interviewed residents recorded at least 29 civilians killed this year in Oleshky and neighboring villages, most by FPV drones. No food had reached Oleshky since 26 May. A few of Oleshky’s trapped residents escaped through ad-hoc volunteer runs, including 32 people during a three-day lull in the shelling. Others could not be moved at all. 

One woman’s husband stayed behind with his 84-year-old father, who could not walk the ten kilometers to the meeting point. 

Russian forces imposing these conditions, the monitors noted, are legally bound to feed the town they occupy. 

The Soviet state followed the same logic, cutting off villages that missed grain quotas and barring peasants from leaving Soviet Ukraine in search of food. 

Ninety years on, Russia is doing it again in Oleshky. Parliament Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets calls Russia's siege deliberate terrorism. 

Oleshky’s exiled administration describes what that means in practice: the dead buried in plastic bags, sometimes marked only with a name and two dates. One man who died in December lay unburied for nearly two months. 

Concerning Oleshky, Oleksandr Prokudin, head of Kherson Regional Military Administration, told Censor.NET that Russian forces have “created a situation there akin to the Holodomor." The historical parallels are not lost on Ukrainians.