Relatives of renowned Welsh journalist Gareth Jones have expressed their deep dismay that a planned memorial, partly funded by the Welsh government, will misrepresent his work and promote Ukrainian propaganda.
Jones famously revealed to the world that there was a man-made famine raging across the Soviet Union in 1933. Just two years later he was kidnapped and murdered by bandits in Inner Mongolia. His story has inspired a number of books as well as the feature film Mr Jones. His life has been honoured with plaques in his home town of Barry and at Aberystwyth University.
However, a plinth due to be unveiled in Kyiv in November has drawn strong criticism from Jones’ relatives. They are calling for work on the memorial to be halted until an acceptable, ‘historically defensible’ wording is agreed. Philip Colley, Jones’s great-nephew and founder of the Gareth Jones Society, said:
We are deeply disheartened that there has been no meaningful attempt to engage with the family’s concerns, not least our belief that a man of peace is being used to promote division at a time of war. It increasingly feels like there is a conspiracy of silence around a taxpayer-funded project that should be subject to proper public and historical scrutiny.
The project has received £16,000 in Welsh Government funding and enjoys cross-party support in the Senedd.
But the family – including five of his six surviving great-nephews and great-nieces – has written jointly to the leaders of every political party represented in the Senedd. Though expressing strong support for commemorating Jones and remembering those who suffered and died in the Soviet famine, they said a permanent monument to him must ‘accurately represent what he himself reported’.
Every version of the proposed inscription seen by the family describes Jones as reporting on the ‘Holodomor’ – a modern Ukrainian word literally meaning “causing death by hunger”. In Ukraine, the word has strong political and legal connotations, implying the famine was a genocide directed against Ukrainians, feeding directly into anti-Russian, pro-war propaganda.
One early version of the wording displayed on a mock-up of the plinth exhibited at the Senedd in March 2026 [see photograph], reads:
Gareth Jones – Welsh journalist who was the first to state in the Western press, under his own name, that the Holodomor occurred in Ukraine in 1932–1933.
But the family say this wording retrospectively recasts Jones as a reporter of an exclusively Ukrainian famine, which distorts history and has the potential to deepen divisions. Colley said:
Jones’s reports described a “general famine” affecting multiple ethnic groups in multiple grain-growing regions across the Soviet Union.
He presented it as afflicting the Soviet peasantry as a social class, not an attack on Ukrainians as an ethnic group. The first published account of Jones’s public disclosure in March 1933 quoted him as saying: “Everywhere was the cry, ‘There is no bread. We are dying.’ This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus and Central Asia.
The proposed inscription on the plinth will be written in stone. The wording should therefore be historically accurate, inclusive and politically impartial. Whatever interpretations have subsequently been placed upon Gareth’s work, his published reports never described a famine confined to Ukraine or an ethnically targeted attack.
He documented Russians, Ukrainians and peasants of mixed Russian-Ukrainian heritage suffering together under the same basic Soviet policies. He never described the famine according to the interpretation now commonly associated with the term ‘Holodomor’.
A monument commemorating him for something he did not do constitutes a political misuse of the past.
‘Gareth was committed to telling the truth. He took considerable professional risks to expose the famine, yet his work is now being misrepresented.Worse still, his reputation for journalistic integrity is being harnessed to lend credibility to that misrepresentation.
“Historically indefensible”
Colley went on to condemn the planned memorial wording as ahistorical and directly at odds with Jones’s internationalism and pacifism:
This is historically indefensible. It is an affront both to his memory and to the many non-Ukrainian famine victims whose suffering he documented and for whom he also spoke.
In a eulogy delivered after Gareth’s death, he was remembered as an ‘apostle of international understanding’ and ‘an interpreter of nations to one another. He was a pacifist and universalist who warned of the dangers of nationalism. His legacy should therefore promote truth, peace and reconciliation—not be appropriated in ways that deepen national divisions at a time of war.
The signatories have proposed the following alternative inscription:
Gareth Jones, Welsh journalist who, in 1933, helped expose the mass starvation afflicting Soviet Ukraine and other regions of the Soviet Union
They say this recognises the full breadth of the suffering Jones documented, not least in Soviet Ukraine, while remaining faithful to the actual geographical scope of his testimony.
The family has asked those responsible for the memorial to halt the erection of the plinth pending further consultation, including reviewing the inscription against Jones’s original published reports, consulting concerned relatives and independent historians with relevant expertise, then either amending the wording so that it accurately reflects Jones’s recorded testimony or withdraw public support if an acceptable formulation cannot be agreed.
The relatives say they hope to engage those responsible for the memorial in meaningful consultation before the scheduled unveiling on 28 November.
Rewriting history
The misleading memorial is just the latest in the attempts of the western and Ukrainian establishment to rewrite history to support the war with Russia, after the US and UK killed an agreed peace deal just weeks into a ‘meat-grinder’ war that is killing 27,000 Ukrainian troops a month.
Until just before Russia’s invasion, the UK’s BBC and other broadcasters were lamenting the rapid rise of actual nazism in Ukraine. Immediately after the invasion, that narrative disappeared – along with many articles and videos about it. The UN condemned Ukraine’s mass slaughter, after the CIA-orchestrated Maidan ‘revolution’ in Ukraine – of Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine years before Russia’s invasion. This slaughter is considered by many as an attempted genocide – but this narrative too is now suppressed and dismissed by a war-hungry EU as a ‘myth’.
These inconvenient narratives were replaced by farcical puff-pieces mocking talk of Ukrainian nazis as ‘exaggerated’ – even as presenters were flanked by troops wearing nazi insignias.
Massacres committed by Ukrainian troops have been presented as Russian atrocities, while a Ukrainian village dentist complained that his store of gold teeth – taken as payment for the treatment – had been stolen by troops eager to claim they were evidence of a Russian ‘torture camp’. That farce was quickly exposed, but is still the official western media story.
Now even the man who exposed famine across the Soviet union is being misrepresented to promote pro-war propaganda.
Philip Colley began researching his great-uncle’s life and murder for an academic paper while studying in China in 1985. He has written about Gareth Jones for publications including The Sunday Times and Le Monde. His academic article on the subject is currently under peer review. Colley will be presenting a public lecture titled ‘The Real Gareth Jones – separating fact from fiction’ at the Temple of Peace in Cardiff on 24 November 2026 at 6.30 pm.
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