Andrii Smytsniuk, Cambridge4Ukraine Chair

In this edition of Cam FM Trending, Aaron sits down with Andrii Smystniuk, chair of the community group Cambridge4Ukraine, for an interview first broadcast on Cam FM News Brunch earlier this month.

Aaron spoke with Andrii following his organisation's commemoration of the Holodomor for Holodomor Memorial Day. The Holodomor was a famine which spread across Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 as a result of Stalin's policies of agricultural collectivisation. Many countries, including the UK, consider it an intentional genocide committed by the Soviet regime against the Ukrainian people.
To commemorate the Holodomor, whose name translates from Ukrainian roughly as "extermination by hunger", Cambridge4Ukraine held a candlemaking workshop and screened the 2019 film Mr Jones, which tells the story of the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones. At considerable personal risk, Jones travelled to the East of Ukraine during the Holodomor, exposing the famine that was taking place there. At the time, not many believed his story, but over time, Jones' journalistic efforts have been vindicated.

As well as discussing the Holodomor and Gareth Jones, Aaron and Andrii talk about the perception and awareness of Ukrainian culture in the UK since Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the growing number of Cambridge students taking up the opportunity to study the Ukrainian language, and how Cambridge's Ukrainian community has changed and grown in the last two years.

Cambridge4Ukraine is a community group which helps Ukrainians based in Cambridge, and runs many events celebrating Ukrainian culture that are open to all throughout the year. You can find out more at cambridge4ukraine.uk.

Cam FM Trending is the home of Cam FM's best speech content, from news, to interviews, to features. This interview was first broadcast on 1 December 2024, following Holodomor Memorial Day on 23 November.