I mean, there was absolutely a famine in Ukraine at the time that resulted in millions of deaths, there's no arguing that. The book I was looking phrased it reasonably well:

These were desperate and brutal men trying to cope with a crisis, not organisers of a deliberate famine.

Stalin had no reason to start a genocide in Ukraine or at all - the people getting sent to gulags were the kulaks, essentially the bourgeoisie landowners in rural Russia. People bitching about that are the same type as the former Cuban plantation owners that talk about how shitty Castro was.