MOSCOW, July 15, 2008 (AFP) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday said it was 'opportunistic' to blame contemporary Russia for a Soviet famine that Ukrainians view as genocide, the Interfax news agency reported.

'These accusations are absolutely immoral and politically opportunistic,' Interfax quoted Medvedev as saying during a visit to an exhibition in Moscow that included a proposed project for a monument to victims of the 1930s famine.

Medvedev was responding to an assertion by the designer of the monument, sculptor Vladimir Surovtsev, who said that 'some people are now trying to blame Russia for this tragedy,' the news agency reported.

'This was our shared tragedy,' Medvedev said.

Some four to 10 million Soviet citizens are estimated to have starved to death after dictator Joseph Stalin imposed collective farming in the 1930s.

Many of the victims were in Ukraine but starvation also struck swathes of farmland in southern Russia and Kazakhstan in Central Asia.

Under pro-Western Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, Kiev has been trying for years to have the United Nations recognise the 1932-33 famine as an act of genocide committed against the Ukrainian people.