Madam Speaker, at the height of the Holodomor, the Kremlin-engineered famine genocide in Ukraine of 1932-33, Zina, a village girl, wrote to her city-dwelling uncle:
We have neither bread nor anything else to eat. Dad is completely exhausted from hunger...unable to get on his feet. Mother is blind from the hunger. Uncle...Please do take me, please. I'm still young and I want so much to live a while. Here I will surely die, for everyone else is dying...
When the uncle received the letter, he was told of her death.
Hundred by hundred, thousand by thousand, million upon million lay down their starved skin-and-bones bodies and became one with Ukraine's fertile black soils, their life extinguished.
On November 28, we memorialize the Holodomor. All our resolutions and our statements of responsibility to protect are nothing more than fine-sounding rhetoric unless each of us makes a pledge of a responsibility to intervene, to act when genocidal crimes occur.
[Member spoke in Ukrainian as follows:]
Bil'sh nikoly.
[English]
Never again.