The Holodomor does not meet that criterion. The Ukrainian famine was not an attempt to eliminate every single living Ukrainian; it was also halted, in the summer of 1933, well before it could devastate the entire nation. Although Lemkin later argued for an expansion of the term, and even described the Sovietization of Ukraine as the “classic example of Soviet genocide,” it is now difficult to classify the Ukrainian famine, or any other Soviet crime, as genocide in international law.9 This is hardly surprising, given that the Soviet Union itself helped shape the language precisely in order to
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