Just watched the Putin Interview, page-7

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2020/...ng-the-kremlins-version-of-ukrainian-history/

"Putin’s statements (which he has reiterated on various occasions) are wrong on two counts: For one, the claim that present-day eastern or southern Ukraine should have been considered part of “the historical South of Russia” or “primordially Russian territories” in the 1920s seems preposterous, since there had been no substantial Russian presence in these territories at any time prior to the 19^th century. Secondly, Putin’s assertion that Ukraine’s south-eastern borders were established “with no consideration for the ethnic make-up of the population” is equally false. The first Soviet census in 1926, a few years after the eastern borders of the UkrSSR had been finalised, showed that in all territories of eastern Ukraine, including those that are now contested, ethnic Ukrainians still far outnumbered ethnic Russians. What ultimately changed this in the 1930s was the demographic devastation wrought by Stalin’s agricultural genocide, the ‘Holodomor’."

https://holodomorct.org/

HOLODOMOR :  The famine-genocide of Ukraine, 1932-1933

The Holodomor is the genocide perpetrated by Stalin’s Communist regime against the Ukrainian nation, the most lethal action being the Great Famine of 1932-1933.
Stalin and his followers were determined to teach the Ukrainian people “a lesson they would not forget.”
Tens of thousands of Ukraine’s intellectual, spiritual, and cultural leaders were arrested, some subjected to show trials and executed, most sent to prison labor camps, often resulting in death.
Many of Ukraine’s best farmers and community leaders, along with their families, were banished to remote territories, where many perished.
Of those remaining, many resisted and staged fierce rebellions against the imposition of collectivization which would transfer not only all their property but their independence to the state.
However, even though most eventually relented, Stalin’s government not only continued to increase quotas in Ukraine, but imposed severe new restrictions on travel in search of food, blockaded entire villages from receiving food, fuel or other necessities, and repeatedly sent out brigades of activists to raid rural households and remove anything edible.  Rural Ukraine, in essence, became a vast concentration camp.
In June of 1933, at the height of the Holodomor, 28,000 men, women and children in Ukraine were dying of starvation each day. The land that was known worldwide as the breadbasket of Europe was being ravaged by a man-made famine of unprecedented scale.
While millions of people in Ukraine and in the mostly ethnically Ukrainian areas of the northern Caucasus were dying, the Communist leadership in Russia was denying the famine and exporting enough grain from Ukraine to have fed the entire population. For 50 years, surviving generations were forbidden to speak of it, until the Soviet Union was near collapse.