The realities of World War II – the deadliest war in human history – have often remained in the shadow cast by Soviet propaganda for international audiences. During the Soviet era, when Ukraine was part of the USSR, the authorities avoided highlighting the losses of each individual republic.
The achievements of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Georgians, Kazakhs, and others were subsumed as part of a general “Soviet” victory. After the USSR collapsed, Russia made the memory of World War II a central theme of its own historical myth, claiming the achievements and participation of all the former Soviet peoples as its own.
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The Ukrainian people suffered some of the greatest losses during the war. Some of the largest battles of the Second World War took place on Ukrainian soil. Yet globally, Ukraine’s role and that of its people during the war are far less recognized than Russia’s. Even US President Donald Trump recently posted about “Russians” fighting alongside Americans in WWII – overlooking the broader Soviet context.
In this conversation with Dr. Yurii Shapoval, we debunk Russian myths about the “Great Patriotic War” and try to cast light on the Ukrainian dimension of World War II.
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Tell us about the conceptual aspects of Ukraine in World War II.
I’d like to start this part of the conversation with the words of American journalist Edgar Snow, who wrote for the Saturday Evening Post in January 1945. He reported from Ukraine, having traveled through a land just liberated from Nazi occupation – and you can imagine what Ukraine looked like in January 1945.
He wrote: “The war which some people consider a symbol of Russian glory should more properly be called the Ukrainian war. No cities, industry, agriculture, or population of any European country,” Snow said, “suffered such destruction as Ukraine.”
These words are key to understanding what happened in Ukraine.
In the diary of prominent Ukrainian Soviet filmmaker Oleksandr Dovzhenko, I found this line: “It seems to me that half of this war is being fought around Ukraine.” At first, I was skeptical – was he exaggerating? But if we look carefully at the strategic plans of the warring parties on the Eastern Front – both Soviet and German – we’ll see that he was right. Ukraine held crucial strategic importance in the events of the war.
How would you characterize Ukraine as a theater of military operations during WWII? What made it decisive?
It’s enough to say that the war swept through the entire territory of Ukraine twice – from west to east and then from east to west. That means Ukraine, in its entirety, experienced active combat and front-line movement twice and endured several years of occupation. You can imagine the devastation.
Over 60 Wehrmacht divisions fought here – about 40% of all German forces – and around 50% of all combat divisions of the Soviet Red Army were engaged. The Soviet path to Central Europe and the Balkans began in Ukraine. Hitler also had Ukraine in his plans – not just for its resources and minerals.
The Nazis intended to depopulate this territory entirely. Instead of Kyiv, they planned to build a city called “Totenburg” – the City of Death. There was the “Hunger Plan,” a genocidal starvation plan targeting Ukrainians – just as Stalin had done in 1933. The author of this plan, a German professor, even wrote a full monograph, which I’ve held in my hands. It left an incredible impression.
Just as Stalin feared Ukraine and tried to tighten control over it, fearing the loss of a strategic foothold, so did Hitler – though with a different lens. These two tyrants shared one trait: both intended to exploit this strategically valuable land to the fullest.
Ukraine was 100% occupied during the war?
Exactly, completely. Europe flirted with Hitler for a long time – “appeasing” him by handing over Czechoslovakian territory, and eventually almost all of Europe quickly fell under Nazi control with minimal resistance. France is a prime example – it officially collaborated with Hitler.
The conquest of Soviet territories by the Nazis in the East was far more brutal. They suffered greater losses but still occupied vast areas. Belarus, the Baltics, and Ukraine were fully occupied, but only 3% of [actual] Russian territory fell under German control. This clearly contradicts Putin’s fairy tales about Russia’s “decisive” role in World War II.
Stalin distrusted those who had lived under occupation. In Ukraine, Soviet filtration camps actively operated. Ukrainians were made to feel guilty simply for being occupied. At the same time, we must be honest: according to Ukrainian Communist Party Secretary Demyan Korotchenko, most Ukrainians did not resist the Nazis.
People were outraged by the Communist terror before the war. Some did resist, some adapted to survive. So, the Soviet myth of unified, nationwide resistance is just that – a myth.
Tell us about Ukraine’s contribution to victory. Donald Trump once wrote on X that “millions of Russians” died in WWII – yet he meant Soviet citizens. What percentage of participants and casualties were Ukrainians?
No calculations are exact, but between 6 and 7 million Ukrainians served in the Soviet army during the war from a total of about 30 million Soviet citizens who served from 1939 to 1945. Do the math – Ukrainians made up a significant percentage. And beyond them, there were many Belarusians, Caucasians, and Central Asians as well.
So, obviously, the Red Army cannot be simply called “Russian.” Over 300 Ukrainians served as generals in the Soviet army, including some marshals.
Ukrainians were awarded 2.5 million Soviet medals and orders – out of a total of 7 million awards. That’s more than 30%. Of all the Heroes of the Soviet Union, 18% were Ukrainians. One of only two triple Heroes of the USSR – top WWII Allied fighter ace Ivan Kozhedub – was a Ukrainian from the Sumy region.
This proves that the victory over Nazism, which Russia now tries to monopolize, cannot be called a “Russian victory.” It’s historically inaccurate to equate “Soviet” with “Russian.”
Casualties. What were Ukraine’s human losses, and how do they compare with Russia and Germany?
For years, Soviet leadership concealed the overall casualty figures. Under Stalin, the official number was 6.5 million. Under Khrushchev, it rose to 20 million. During Gorbachev’s time, the USSR acknowledged 27 million. After the USSR collapsed and historians accessed the archives, estimates in the mid-1990s reached 31–32 million total Soviet losses.
But that figure didn’t stick – partly due to Putin’s efforts. So, Russia now officially claims 27 million Soviet deaths. Germany lost 6.5 million, including about 3 million military personnel. This shows that the Soviet – and now Russian – approach of using people as cannon fodder has deep roots. The infamous human wave attacks we see from Russia today are no innovation – they’re a Soviet tradition. Just the 1945 Berlin offensive alone cost the Soviet army nearly 800,000 killed and wounded.
Ukraine’s losses are included in the Soviet total. Ukraine lost, by various scholarly estimates, around 10 million people.
This includes not only military casualties but also civilians killed in combat, forced labor deportations to Germany, and between 1 and 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews murdered during the Holocaust.
Take Babyn Yar, where about 100,000 people – mostly Jews from Kyiv – were executed by Nazis in the space of just a few days. Beyond this, the Nazis implemented a genocide against Slavs, whom they considered Untermenschen (subhumans), gradually applying an extermination policy.
The Soviet regime also showed little regard for human life, exemplified by the “black infantry” – the forced conscription of civilians from liberated areas, sent into battle without training or weapons, leading to high casualties.
Yes, I first heard about this from relatives – rural boys conscripted by Soviet commanders and sent ahead of regular troops, suffering huge losses.
Now we have Soviet command documents confirming these offensives with untrained civilians pushed ahead of regular troops. This clearly shows the Soviet attitude toward human life.
What can be said about the contribution of Ukrainians to the armies of the Western Allies?
This part of World War II was long kept in the shadows and rarely discussed. But now there’s growing academic work being carried out that shows Ukrainians fought in all Allied armies.
Up to 50,000 Ukrainians served with Canadian units of the British Empire – including over 500 officers. More than 10% of Canada’s Ukrainian population fought for the Canadian forces. In the US, where there’s also a large Ukrainian diaspora, over 40,000 Ukrainians joined its military expeditionary forces in Europe. Ukrainians also fought in the Pacific, North Africa, and Italy. On the Elbe River, US-Ukrainian soldiers met Ukrainian Soviet soldiers.
Up to 5,000 Ukrainians fought in the French armed forces and the Resistance. A notable example is Vasyl Poryk – a Ukrainian Soviet POW who escaped Nazi captivity and led a partisan unit in northern France.
And, of course, the Polish army. Ukrainians fought in it from the very first day of WWII –Sept. 1, 1939. Later, in 1941, when the USSR faced a crisis and allowed the creation of a Polish army under General Anders, over 10% of the 60,000 troops were Ukrainians. They fought in Iran, Iraq, Sudan, and Italy – including in the famous Battle of Monte Cassino.
So, Ukrainians made a substantial contribution to the Allied victory over Nazism across various national armies.
Russian propaganda accuses Ukrainians of “Nazism” and “collaboration.” How many collaborators were there in Ukraine during World War II, and were there more than, say, in other European countries or in Russia itself?
When Russians accuse other nations of collaboration and Nazism – not only Ukrainians, but also Lithuanians, Estonians, and Crimean Tatars – I recall a little-known example: the Lokot Republic. This was a self-governing collaborationist puppet entity on Russian territory that existed from 1941 to 1943, in the occupied Bryansk region of Russia. It was autonomous, waged war against Soviet partisans and sabotage units of the Soviet secret services and was an ally of Nazi Germany. This republic was founded in the fall of 1941 by two local distillery engineers – Voskoboinyk and Kaminsky.
This “republic” is a true symbol of Russian collaborationism. While in other occupied Soviet territories – including Ukraine – the German administration played the primary role and did not entrust locals with any levers of governance, here it was different: authority belonged not to the German commandant but to local self-government. The Germans were even forbidden to interfere in internal affairs. In other words, Russians themselves voluntarily served the Third Reich.
The Germans also attempted to establish the “People’s Socialist Party of Russia,” which was later revived as the “National Socialist Party Vityaz.” Today in Russia, people are not very fond of discussing this. It was an attempt to create an independent Russian government. The Germans recognized the Lokot Republic; it had its own administrative system – it even had its own army of 12–13 thousand men.
As for other Russian formations within the Nazi Reich, it’s enough to mention the Vlasov Army – a force of 1 million people under the command of General Andrey Vlasov, a hero of the defense of Kyiv and Moscow in 1941. Not to mention the numerous Cossack formations that served with the Third Reich. These examples show that Nazism was already ideologically close to many Russians at that time.
As for the accusations against Ukrainians – this was done deliberately and was constantly fueled by Soviet authorities with the aim of discrediting the Ukrainian national liberation movement, which indeed included various individuals, but which fought simultaneously against two totalitarian regimes – both Nazi and Soviet.
It is telling that at the Nuremberg Trials, the Soviet side did not accuse Ukrainian nationalist forces of Nazism – that only began after the war…
Exactly. There was nothing of the kind said at the time – nothing resembling the narratives later promoted by communist propaganda. The Nuremberg proceedings had a fascinating backstory: before the trials began, there was an agreement between the two chief prosecutors – from the US and Soviet sides. They drafted a list of topics that the USSR did not want discussed during the trials.
Among those topics was the Soviet political system, which was just as totalitarian as the Nazi regime, as well as the issues of repression and deportations. Also included were questions about Soviet cooperation with Hitler at the start of the war. The Soviet invasions of neutral countries – such as Finland – were also off-limits.
There were many such points. And had those prosecutors decided that Ukrainian nationalism and any alleged collaboration of Ukrainian nationalists needed to be addressed, they would have included it in the list of officially declared topics for discussion. But that issue appeared in neither list.
This indicates that all the accusations made after the fact by the USSR against [Stepan] Bandera and [Roman] Shukhevych were fabricated and aimed solely at discrediting the Ukrainian national movement.
As for collaborators in general – we still see such people today: individuals who, for various reasons, cooperate with Russian occupiers. War always brings moral disintegration, a collapse of values. War is fear, and a desire to survive at any cost. Often, it’s the temptation to take revenge on a neighbor for past wrongs. It’s a complex mix of motives that drive people and can push them in different directions.
And this isn’t unique to Ukraine – it was the same in other countries occupied during World War II. Just recall Knut Hamsun, the famous Norwegian writer whose works are studied in schools, but who was a fervent collaborator with the Nazi occupation.
So, there was nothing unique or exceptional about Ukraine’s situation during World War II – nothing that differed fundamentally from what happened in any country during wartime occupation. Yet Russian imperialism still tries to single out and accuse Ukrainians.
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