Fellow Ukrainian citizens!

Today, traditionally on the fourth Saturday of November, we remind ourselves with grief of those dramatic pages of history of our people and commemorate the victims of the Holodomors that befell the Ukrainians.

In different nooks of the country, there are being held commemorative worship services, and citizens carry symbolic pots with crops to the memorials to the victims of famines. This evening in the windows of millions of Ukrainian households will be lit candles. Ukrainians recall and pay tribute to the previous generations, those who had become victims to inhuman turmoils and trials - Holodomors.

One of the most horrific ordeals was the Holodomor of 1932-1933, when several millions of Ukrainians were subjected to the methodical destruction through starvation. This is one of the most atrocious acts of the 20th century having unprecedented scale and one of the bloodiest episodes in the history of mankind. According to historians, at least 3.9 million people were killed. Many millions of Ukrainians were never born.

In the 20th century, Ukrainians survived two more massive famine-genocides of 1921-1923 and 1946-1947, which, according to witnesses and historians, also have signs of ethnic cleansing and, consequently, were deliberately organized. Those terrible crimes against humanity were aimed at destroying the whole nation. The tremendous effort of the Ukrainian nation had helped to survive these tragedies, but the memory of those, especially of Holodomor of 1932-1933, has remained in almost every Ukrainian family.

I bow low to the victims of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 and other famines in Ukraine. I urge every Ukrainian to light a candle today and honor the memory of our fellow countrymen killed by starvation with a minute of silence. We will never forget the bone-chilling episodes of those times. Our brothers and sisters who were starved to death will always remain in our memory. They wanted to bring us down, but we survived and today we are building a society with human life as an essential value.

Eternal memory!

Prime Minister of Ukraine                                                         Volodymyr GROYSMAN