By 2016 the arguments had come full circle. The post-Soviet Russian state was once again in full denial: the Holodomor did not happen, and only “Nazis” would claim that it did. All these arguments muddied the application of the word “genocide” so successfully that to use it in any Russian or Ukrainian context has become wearyingly controversial. People feel exhausted by the debate—which was, perhaps, the point of the Russian assault on the historiography of the famine in the first place.
