Yushchenko understood the power of the famine as a unifying national memory for Ukrainians, especially because it had been so long denied. He undoubtedly “politicized” it, in the sense that he used political tools to draw more attention to the story. Some of his own statements about the famine, particularly his claims about the number of casualties, were exaggerated. But he stopped short of using the famine to antagonize Ukraine’s Russian neighbours, and he did not describe the famine as a “Russian” crime against Ukrainians. Indeed, at the seventy-fifth anniversary Holodomor commemoration
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