Ukraine had the supreme misfortune of being stuck between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin during World War II.
And Ukrainians paid a heavy price that is still felt today: More than eight million killed, the entire territory fought over by competing armies and, tragically, instances of Ukrainians fighting on both sides – although most took part on the Soviet side. To this day, the soldiers in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army are vilified by the Kremlin for waging war against the Soviets in hopes of an independent Ukraine, a struggle that lasted into the 1950s.
But independence would not come to Ukraine, of course, until 46 years after the war.
Still, despite the monumental sacrifices, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly shown contempt for Ukraine as a nation and denigrated its wartime contributions.
“We would have won anyway, because we are a country of winners,” Putin said in 2010. “This means that the war was won – I do not want to offend anyone – mainly due to the human and industrial resources of the Russian Federation.”
Ahead of the 70th anniversary of the end of the WWII, Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko traveled to Odesa to take part in celebrations dedicated to the liberation of the Black Sea port city on April 10. During his speech, Poroshenko addressed Putin’s criticisms.
“Such words are the desecration of the memory of the slain soldiers and abuse of the feelings of living veterans,” Poroshenko said. “They would not have won this war without Ukrainians. There is even nothing to argue about! But one could argue whether the war would have started if the Kremlin did not sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.”
The non-aggression treaty, signed on Aug. 23, 1939 by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, included a secret pact which divided Central and Eastern Europe into Soviet and German spheres of influence.
The evil alliance gave Nazi Germany the green light to invade western Poland a little more than a week later, on Sept. 1, without any fear of Soviet repercussions. Some mark this day as the start of WWII, although Hitler had already annexed Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland and Austria by that time.
On Sept. 17, the Soviet Union launched its own invasion of Poland, occupying Volyn and Halychyna, historical Ukrainian territories which then belonged to Poland.
It took Nazi Germany less than two years to violate its pact with the Soviet Union. On June 22, 1941, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.
Some historians consider it pointless to argue whether Ukraine’s contributions to victory were decisive. “We don’t know what would have happened,” said historian Oleksandr Lysenko.
More than seven million citizens of Soviet Ukraine fought in the Red Army, according to the Institute of History of Ukraine and National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, where Lysenko works. This constituted 23 percent of the Soviet Union’s armed forces and the second biggest representation in the Red Army after Russia. Another 300,000 Ukrainians became partisans assisting the Red Army in their operations. Some 100,000 people participated in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known as UPA, which fought against Soviets, Nazis and Poles. Another 250,000 Ukrainians fought in the ranks of other allied armies.
Marshals and generals of Ukrainian origin headed more than half of the 15 fronts that operated during the Nazi-Soviet war. The Hero of the Soviet Union title was given to 2,072 Ukrainians. One Ukrainian pilot, Ivan Kozhedub, won the award three times for his success in shooting down 64 German aircraft.
On Jan. 27, 1945, Ukrainians in the Red Army took part in liberation of Auschwitz, Poland, one of the biggest Nazi concentration camps.
A Ukrainian, Oleksiy Berest, was one of three Red Army soldiers who set the Victory banner at the top of Reichstag building in Berlin few days before Nazi Germany capitulated and unconditionally surrendered on May 8, 1945, for Victory in Europe Day.
After that, Ukrainians in the Soviet army took part in the defeat of Japan’s Kwantung Army in the Far East. It was a Ukrainian, Kuzma Derevyanko, who signed Japan’s Instrument of Surrender on Sept. 2 the same year, marking the official end of WWII.
But Ukraine was devastated by then, experiencing a second successive decade of mass killings, the first coming when at least 3 million Ukrainians were killed in Stalin’s forced famine of the Holodomor, from 1932-33.
By the start of 1945, with the war having killed at least eight million people, the population of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialistic Republic dropped to 27.4 million from 41 million as recently as 1941.
Around 3.5 million of the dead were Ukrainian citizens who fought in the Red Army, a casualty rate that amounted to half of the more than seven million soldiers mobilized into the Red Army.
More than five million civilians were killed, including 1.5 millions Jews murdered in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.
At least 700 cities and some 28,000 villages in Ukraine were destroyed or heavily damaged.
“Demographic and economic losses of Ukraine in this war were terrific,” said Volodymyr Viatrovych, head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance. “And it seems to me we will never know the exact number as there are almost no initial sources.”
Viatrovych said that Soviet propaganda hid the enormity of the losses because it would spoil the myth of the great victory.
Russia still keeps its archive on Red Army soldiers, including Ukrainians, closed. Ukraine has just opened its archives of the Soviet secret services after a law adopted by Parlaiment on April 9, which could shed light on war crimes.
“Immediately after the expulsion of the Nazis from Ukraine, another totalitarian regime – communism –established on its territory,” Viatrovych said. “It also led to terrible losses.”
The tragedy of Ukrainians in World War II was that they did not have their own state and fought against each other in the ranks of the Polish Army, the Nazi unit SS Halychyna, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Red Army.
This was another reason Ukraine’s losses were so huge.
“This is very complicated and controversial history,” Lysenko said. “This is a big tragedy. There is no place for one-sided views here. This is war.”
Many view the biggest lesson from WWII for today’s 45 million Ukrainians is to fight to keep their independence as a nation. Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine has driven home this point at a cost of more than 6,100 people killed thus far in the 13-month old conflict.
As the new war rages on, historians in Ukraine continue to count the victims of WWII. They are kept in a special Book of Remembrance at the war museum in Kyiv. At the moment, the list consists of 6,038,000 names.
And this is not the end.
Kyiv Post freelance writer Oksana Lyachynska can be reached at [email protected].
