Ukrainians... Victorious or Victims of War?

By Vasyl Chervoniy 

Translated by Ihor Cap and Dariya Dyryk-Cap

What prompted me to write is the large-scale propagandist campaign with anti-Ukrainian undertones, dedicated to the so-called Victory Day inundating all the Ukrainian TV channels and Ukrainian cities.

Not even in the days of Scherbitsky or Kuchma were there such loud panegyrics to the "liberators" as during Yushchenko’s rule.  It stretched a whole three weeks, and this, on the 18th year of Ukrainian Independence!

My relatives, like most Ukrainians, fought against fascism in the Red Army, as well as in the ranks of UPA. That is why it is easy for me to speak on the subject of war with any audience. However, I will no longer tolerate the belittlement of Ukrainians by downplaying their contribution as far as ridding Europe of German fascism and Eurasia from Russian national-bolshevism and by affixing us with non-existant blame for the sins of others.

After 18 years, the leaders of Ukraine still did not produce their own Ukrainian assessment of the war, the consequences of war, and the contribution of the Ukrainian people’s victory over both aggressors and organizers of the war – the Nazis and Communists.

For this very reason, the schoolchildren’s history textbooks still teach almost without change the Soviet history of war, that is, the Russian interpretation, equating it with the history of the so-called Great Patriotic War.

For many in Ukraine, it is not desirable that Ukrainians learn the whole truth about the bloody events for the years 1938-1953. Because this new generation might have normal, and not restrained slave-like demands from their neighbors – the former invaders.

We need to know history without embellishment. Study it based on truthful facts, looking at it through Ukrainian eyes, and not borrowed ones from the Muscovite or Tel-Aviv envoy.  Because those who started the war or those who did not have the courage to take arms against both these aggressors will continue to use and enrich themselves by the results of war at the expense of the bones of millions of Ukrainian victims of war.

The historical truth is that the Second World War began not in the year 1941 with the attack of Germany on the USSR, but in the year 1939 with the attack of the USSR on Finland, and later Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Poland.

Moreover, in the first two years of the war, the USSR and Germany were allied states; their leaders Hitler and Stalin sympathetic to each other; the Red Army and Wehrmacht soldiers conducted joint military parades in Grodno, Brest, Pinsk, and Zolochev. In the newspaper "Pravda", Beria called German National Socialism a brother ideology.

Little wonder this German-Soviet friendship led to the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. This pact untied the hands of aggressive Moscow in its bid to occupy enormous territories of neighboring states.

Already in September of 1939, all of Ukraine found itself under Soviet occupation. To the Western Ukrainian lands came not liberation, but terror, expropriation and collectivization, arrests and mass executions of activists from patriotic organizations, priests, and intelligentsia. Kazakhstan and Siberia absorbed almost 1.2 million deported so-called enemies of the state.

Today, Moscow and Kyiv are quiet about this. That new Ukrainian recruits were thrown to the German defense are precisely the thing neither wants attention drawn to.  They had no weapons, no cartridges, and faced the muzzle of special detachments called “zahradzahony” in order to kill off those who survived the frightful Holodomor (Famine-Genocide).

I too must make mention of the talentless and cruel Red generals who surrendered to German captivity an army of a million during the defense of Kyiv and Kharkiv.

To this day, we do not know the whole truth about the penal battalions, about the mass executions by communists of those who escaped German captivity and the Soviet concentration camps for those who already have been in the fascist camps.  We also do not know enough about the special role of SMERSH, the NKVD that had spies in every military unit, and NKVD detachments sent to Western Ukraine under the guise of Red partisans who were to fight the fascists, but instead fought with the Ukrainian insurgents and peaceful civilians.

The Letts, Estonians, Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians well remember the Mongol-Tatar like treachery and exceptional cruelty of the so-called liberators.  The Soviet “liberators” raped 15 million women (on the territory of the GDR – practically all of the women!), of which 6 million had abortions. Nothing of the sort happened in the British or American occupied zones. The economy of the socialist camp countries (Soviet occupied zone) fell decades behind in comparison to the European countries, which found themselves under NATO.

All of this meant hundreds of thousands of innocent victims. All of this – the bitter truth of war, which inflicted upon Ukrainians irreversible losses. According to English historian Norman Davis, 20 million Ukrainians perished during the Second World War – experiencing the biggest losses among all the nations of the world.

This is why the Europeans should kiss the hands of Ukrainians, and build them monuments. The Europeans should not be tied to the FSB and Mossad apron strings, which blame the Ukrainians as fascist collaborators as cynically done by the German Themis regarding the Red Army soldier John Demyanyuk, who was a German captive.

Yes, some Ukrainians, as with all (I underline--all Europeans!) fought on the side of Germans. However, they did not fight alongside the Germans to the end of the war.  Moreover, it was only one division “Galicia” and two battalions - "Nakhtigal'" and "Roland" (in no way connected with UPA, that on the whole numbered not more than 30 thousand soldiers. 

This is in sharp contrast to whole countries, such as Italy, Japan, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Croatia etc that were allies of Germany. The number of Poles, Jews, French, Belgians and other occupied nations of Europe, which fought in the SS ranks, and Wermakht or who served in the auxiliary police and guard units and other formations of the 3rd Reich, was in every European nation far more numerous, than the mentioned 30 thousand Ukrainians.

Today we can boldly assert that the Ukrainians were the least numerous among the occupied nations of Europe that voluntarily or forcedly stood under the flags and bayonets of Adolf Hitler! In the summer of 1942, almost 500 thousand Russians already served in the German army and by the end of that very same year, there numbers fluctuated between 800 to 1 million persons in the ranks of the Wermakht, SS and other military police and auxiliary formations.

Well known French historian K.K Zhura asserts that they numbered one and a half million. The Russian figured in appreciably after the German in consenting to fight the uncompromising battles under the Nazi flag against the Red Army, the Soviet state and their Motherland.  Why then do the Russians, Poles or Jews dare not call them fascist henchmen or Nazi collaborators? Instead, they call Ukrainians fascists with more frequency.  Moreover, this is happening on Ukrainian TV stations. Is it because that Ukrainians do not own these TV channels?

Is the so-called Ukrainian government incapable of understanding this? They do not understand, because the president, government, and parliament bought in to the cheap Russian propaganda and are diffusing in Ukraine foreign to Ukrainians the notion of the “Great Victory” of the so-called Soviet people, meaning Stalin. Proof? Simple! The Ukrainian government does not consider it necessary to condemn Communism and Stalin as Nazism and Hitler were condemned in 1945.

Russia not only appropriated victory over fascism for itself, it also exploits this date as an ideological Place d’Armes to fight Ukrainian statehood for a renewed occupation of Ukraine - at first, ideological, informational, religious, economic, and afterwards territorial.

The truth is that, after June 1941, Ukraine found itself in the grindstones between two totalitarian regimes and most Ukrainians did not have any choice in the mobilization. As such, we must properly honor those Ukrainians forcibly mobilized into the Red Army because they were the ones who perished in the fight against fascism.

Few know that amongst the cohort of Heroes of the Soviet Union, half are Ukrainians, as well as, that in 2009 only 219 thousand front-line soldiers live in Ukraine. Yet, the so-called All Ukrainian Veterans Organization numbers 3 million members. It is precisely them, the NKVD, KGB, and Political Instructors, born after 1927 that we see out on parade, where there are no longer any front-line soldiers. Because the front-line soldiers are way, over 80 and they barely glimmer from their wretched pensions, unlike the fattened NKVD Veterans.

However, the biggest shame of the present Ukrainian government is that those who voluntarily fought the German, Russian, Hungarian, Polish and other invaders go unrecognized by the Ukrainian state. That is, the Ukrainian insurgents – the true Heroes of Ukraine. It is precisely their immortal deeds that brought Ukraine it’s longed for Independence. For Ukrainians, the Second World War ended only on August 24, 1991.

We will not have a strong national state, such as created, for example, by the Jews, as victims of war until we have a pro-Ukrainian government. We need a government, which demands respect from other countries and nations for Ukrainians as a nation that laid the most victims on the altar of victory over fascism.

Ukrainians were not victorious, but victims of war, and no less, than the Jews. For this reason, we have no less right, than the Jews, to establish our own national state. A state where representatives of the indigenous nation would control all aspects, of political, economic, military, informational, cultural, and spiritual life, because it has made the greatest sacrifice amongst the nations of the world to earn its sacred right for its own national revival from the ashes of war.

Therefore, the first step in this direction should be a refusal to flirt with former obvious and secret war organizers and celebrations of the so-called “Victory Day” following foreign scenarios. Instead, the closing days of the Second World War should remain only as days of remembrance, when all Ukrainians following Christian traditions will pray in the temples and nearby graves of all victims and all participants of war. This should be done in the name of reconciliating Ukrainians with other Ukrainians, in the name of Ukraine, and not its executioners, which still have not repented!

Author: Vasyl Chervoniy is the People’s Deputy (Member of Parliament) of Ukraine of the fourth convocation.

Translated by: Ihor Cap and Dariya Dyryk-Cap

Contact Translators: at

Source of Original Article: Українська Правда .