Just what would be the motivation behind that?
As an ethnicity, there is little to no difference between eastern Ukrainians and Russians. The Soviet Union even actively preserved local languages like Ukrainian, although they cracked down very harshly on anything culturally they considered at odds with Marxism, like the Orthodox Church, but that wasn't targeted any more against Ukraine compared to other Soviey member states.
> Russians already attempted this in the 1930s by starving several million Ukrainians to death through artificial famines.
Even if this opinion is popular nowadays it's highly misleading.
What caused the holodomor was that agricultural areas and Ukraine in general was highly FAVORED by the Soviets.
Ukraine got a high priority on all the things the Soviets thought of as GOOD. Specifically related to the holodomor:
- Collectivization of farming and industry
- Execution of 'greedy factory and farm owners depriving the proletariat of the fruits of their labor' and those colaborating with them to sabotage communism
- Development and implementation of Marxist sciences, soon after developing into Lysenkoism
- Management of production by implementing quotas based on last year's performance
- Oversight over all production processes, labor and property by party commissars, enforcing the "dictatorship of the proletariat"
- Strict reporting duties to the party management
And in 1928, when the implementation of these policies rapidly accelerated in Ukraine and, to a lesser degree, in other agricultural areas, they seemed like a great success.
The "kulaks" left large amounts of their fields without crops or crops they would later destroy, according to the communists 'to oppress the proletariat and cause the periodic famines', and since of all of the kulaks and their "supporters" had to keep absolutely silent or were executed otherwise, nobody told the Marxists about crop rotation.
Which worked out great in the beginning. The farms could be expanded onto the unused farmland, priority was given to high yield crops like grains and the harvests shot through the roof. And this carried on for another year, despite the soils already starting to be depleted, because the seeds from the previous year stored a lot of the macro and micro nutrients the plants would require throughout their growth.
The Marxists felt greatly vindicated in their believes and the "revolutionary discovery" of Marxist science, that "certain types of seasonal variation of crops could be converted into others by just keeping to grow it throughout the seasons on the same field", allowing for further simplification of growing and storage procedures on the collective farms, created a giant almost nationwide crop monoculture.
Thanks to modern pesticides and fertilizers monocultures have become favored again, but back then this was a catastrophe.
The soil was depleted, the stored nutrients in seeds were depleted, there were unfavorable weather conditions and pests and crop diseases began rapidly spreading throughout the monoculture, accelerated by the weakened plants.
So while the quota was even more increased due to last year's great performance, harvests began decreasing, initially slowly, but soon rapidly.
The Soviet commissars went to the farms to check what was happening and found farmers just throwing aside crops (the ones with diseases) and hungry people, who suffered under the bad harvest combined with high quotas, coming to collect these crops. Of course, as is Communist tradition, these people were quickly executed or shipped of to "internment" camps and collective farms were heavily guarded.
But both soils and seeds became more and more nutrient depleted, the grain quality kept decreasing, requiring more to achieve the same nutritional value, crop diseases became ever more prevalent and harvests were about to hit rock bottom.
The communists, as always convinced by the perfection of their ideology, came to the conclusion that the kulaks and their supporters were sabotaging Communism. As vindictive as demanded by their ideology, they immediately started measures to root out the problem. Collective farms "subverted by the kulaks" had their quotas skyrocketed and leaving them or trading with them was forbidden.
Afraid to end up being targeted next when not meeting their quota, other farms and their officials collected grains from where ever they could, including from normal people, emergency reserves and even seeds for the next year and crops with diseases were cleaned up and included in the shipments.
People became sick due to the low quality and quantity of crops and malnutritioned, they could work less and less effectively, there were still all of the previous unresolved problems and on top of that the emergency rations (except for those managed directly by the party in secret) were gone.
Queue the holodomor.