The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is drafting a resolution urging Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Moldova to open their archives on the Great Famine (Holodomor) of the Ukrainian SSR in the 1930s.
The report commemorating the victims of the Holodomor in the former USSR will be discussed during the PACE session on Wednesday.
"The Assembly welcomes the important work already done in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and in particular in Ukraine in order to ease access to archives, and calls on the competent authorities of these countries to open up all their archives and facilitate access thereto to all researchers, including from other states," the document says.
PACE also called for other Council of Europe member states to make their national archives open and accessible.
The draft resolution says the famine, caused by the "cruel and deliberate actions and policies of the Soviet regime" was responsible for the deaths of "millions of innocent people," not only in Ukraine, but also in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Russia.
The report also mentioned the millions who died in Kazakhstan. It said the ratio of the dead to the whole population in the country is believed to be the highest among all peoples of the former USSR.
Russia has said that it cannot accept a number of amendments to the PACE resolution, including a proposal to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide of the Ukrainian people.
Russia says the famine cannot be considered an act that targeted Ukrainians, as millions of people from different ethnic groups also lost their lives in vast territories across the Soviet Union.
Ukrainian nationalists say Russia, as the legal successor of the Soviet Union, should bear responsibility for the famine in which more than 3 million people perished in Ukraine.
Under former president Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine was seeking international recognition of the famine as an act of genocide.
STRASBOURG, April 26 (RIA Novosti)
