Holodomor is genocide. Ukraine was in a bad position no matter how one spins it during World War II and after.
What I do not get is leftists like to accuse anyone they disagree with being a Nazis or white supremacist. The left has a thing for Joseph Stalin. The leftist New York Times even downplayed Holodomor.
Stalin is a monster right next to Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Hideki Tojo, and Pol Pot.
It may be dated, because the USSR had not yet fallen, but Robert Conquest's
Harvest of Sorrow is a horrifying introduction to the Holodomor. Libs and Progs who have heard of their work hate Conquest and Solzhenitsyn because of what they exposed, all the more because they were correct before Libs and Progs were shamed into admitting what Stalin had done (or into ignoring it).
Ukraine was in an ugly position in WW2. It had been conquered/grafted onto the Russian Empire, mostly during the 18th Century (Crimea, ca. 1800). In their "wisdom", the Czars had worked to suppress the Ukrainian language and culture (as did Soviet leaders throughout the 20th Century). After Lenin and Stalin solidified their empire (failing to conquer Poland in that process), Stalin made starving (by confiscating food) Ukraine part of his collectivization and anti-Kulak efforts.
This starvation was the Holodomor. Conquest estimates, IIRC, that 10 million dies. Other estimates I've seen are in the 5 million range. The NYT's Walter Duranty flakked for Stalin and denied the mass starvation that was happening and Stalin's other brutalities. The NYT received - and to this date has never returned - a Pulitzer Prize for Duranty's lying propaganda.
In terms of innocent humans killed, Stalin is second to Mao and ahead of Hitler, who is third worst. OTOH, in terms of percentage of available victims, Pol Pot may be worst, because he had only the population of Cambodia from which to pick his victims.
That was the context in Ukraine when Hitler invaded the USSR. It may seem bizarre to us,
in hindsight, but at first Hitler was viewed by many Ukrainians as a liberator. They had no experience with and little knowledge of Hitler's Master Race garbage. They learned they were wrong, the hard way. Hitler viewed Slavs as inferiors, and Ukrainians were/are Slavic. A split came about between those who realized that Stalin was the Devil they would have in the future and those who thought some degree of Ukrainian independence could be eked out of the fight between Hitler and Stalin. History proved the former correct, as to who would win and Stalin's character.
"What I do not get is leftists like to accuse anyone they disagree with being a Nazis or white supremacist." At present, it is some conservatives who are claiming that Ukraine is neo-Nazis.
That was the point of ZeroHedge's post, to smear Zelensky with a nearly 100YO former private or corporal who probably was a conscript. When one wants to believe that Ukraine is neo-Nazis, using a (probable) conscript of 1944 or 1945 who has been living in Canada since 1947 or 1948 being honored by Canada in 2023 to "prove" that Ukraine is neo-Nazis makes sense.