The probe was opened following an appeal by Academician Yukhnovsky, the head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, VR lawmakers O. Chornovolenko and H. Omelchenko, L. Lukyanenko, the head of the Association of Holodomor Researchers, R. Krutsyk, the head of the Memorial Society as well as other prominent Ukrainians. In the appeal, they demanded to investigate the murder by famine of millions of Ukrainians in 1932-1933.

After analyzing the appeal and reports about the genocide, SBU in cooperation with the Prosecutor General’s Office and UINM carried out an examination of case materials indicating that, following the defeat of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1921, the Bolsheviks launched large-scale unlawful campaign to forestall the emergence of an independent Ukrainian state and to turn Ukraine into a denationalized territory of the FSU.

To this end, the Soviet regime introduced forced collectivization of farms, dekulakization, deportation of Ukrainian families to Siberia and Kazakhstan, illegal seizure of their land and property, repression and physical extermination of Ukrainian farmers.

The Stalin regime destroyed traditional individual farming system, replacing it with state-run kolhosps. To enforce this transition, the Bolsheviks confiscated grain and food supplies, imposed harsh quotas for grain deliveries, banned trade in food in rural areas, black-listed farmers who could not cope with overly high grain delivery quotas and expelled them to remote areas of the USSR. The regime banned the starving Ukrainians to leave their villages in search of food, used military and NKVD units to seal off Ukraine – creating unbearable conditions for the survival of Ukrainian farmers.

Such unlawful actions of the Stalin regime were aimed at murdering the Ukrainian nation by famine.

Other nations living in Ukraine at the time were also affected by regime’s crimes.

 SBU officials interviewed eye-witnesses of the 1932-1933 Holodomor, declassified Soviet archive materials, research documents by domestic and foreign scholars, media reports of the period, and Kyiv Mohyla and Lviv Franko universities lawyers defining the Soviet regime’s atrocities as murder by starvation which can be classified as a crime against humanity.