Written Statement: Memorial in Kyiv to honour the work of the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones

Following a request for funding from the Senedd Cross Party Group Friends of Ukraine, the Welsh Government has agreed to offer a donation of £16,000 to establish a memorial in Kyiv to honour the work of the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones. This is on the basis of the proposal and costs provided by the Cross Party Group Friends of Ukraine. This will be in the form of a trilingual plinth. The project will be commissioned by the Senedd Cross-Party Group 

During recent years, several Senedd Members have visited Ukraine on a number of occasions to deliver vital aid. In addition, in April 2025 a delegation of five Senedd Members  visited Ukraine to honour the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones. They discussed with the leaders of Kyiv Council the possibility of erecting a trilingual plinth in Welsh, English and Ukrainian to mark a street which has been named after Gareth Jones. This project therefore has cross-party support. 

Gareth Jones (1905 –1935) was a Welsh journalist from Barry who reported on the Holodomor (Soviet Ukrainian famine, 1932-1933), the tensions in Europe in the mid-1930s and the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. His exposé on the famine, was based on his own eyewitness testimony after travelling in the region and revealed the scale and horror of the Holodomor to an international audience. He was almost alone in reporting on starvation in both Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine and did so anonymously in The Times in 1931.  His diaries describe in some detail his visits to the Soviet Union between 1931 and 1933, especially his travels there, the people whom he meets and graphic accounts of the conditions of the Holodomor, the severe famine which accounted for between four and six million deaths in Soviet Ukraine.