The Blogs: Ukraine, its Jews and the victory over Nazism that Russia is trying to steal | Alexander Lutsenko

Ukraine paid an enormous price for the defeat of Nazism — including its Jewish population — yet Moscow keeps turning a multiethnic tragedy into a Russian political myth.

There is a dangerous habit in the way World War II is remembered in today’s Russia. The victory over Nazism is presented almost as if it belonged to Moscow alone — as if Russia were the sole heir, sole guardian, and sole “rights holder” of that victory.

It is not true.

The victory over Nazi Germany was paid for by many peoples. Among those who paid one of the heaviest prices was Ukraine — not only ethnic Ukrainians, but also the many communities that lived on Ukrainian soil before and during the war: Jews, Poles, Russians, Crimean Tatars, Roma, Belarusians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Romanians and others.

For Israeli readers, this history is not distant. Ukraine was not only a battlefield. It was also one of the great landscapes of Jewish life in Eastern Europe — and then one of the central killing grounds of the Holocaust.

At NAnews – Nikk.Agency Israel News, we look at this history not as a distant Soviet chapter, but as a question of honest memory for Israelis, Ukrainians and Jews whose family stories often meet on the same map.

Already in January 1945, the American journalist Edgar Snow, after returning from the Soviet Union, published an article in The Saturday Evening Post titled “The Ukraine Pays the Bill.” It was not a book, but a magazine report, published on January 27, 1945.

In that article, Snow presented a shocking estimate: at least 10 million lives lost in Ukraine — soldiers and civilians — and material damage of 30 to 40 billion dollars. These figures, according to the account discussed in the NAnews article, were given to him by Ukrainian Soviet officials, including Vasyl Starchenko, deputy head of the government of the Ukrainian SSR for agriculture, and Volodymyr Valuyev, head of the republic’s planning body. They knew the real condition of the liberated territories and the scale of destruction.

Snow understood something that later Soviet memory tried to blur. The territory of the Russian SFSR was only partly occupied by Nazi Germany, while much of Ukraine passed through the full machinery of war: front lines, occupation, looting, destruction, mass death and demographic collapse.

Soviet statistics, however, minimized the Ukrainian tragedy. In 1946, the Soviet journal Bolshevik spoke of 7 million total Soviet losses. In May 1945, Stalin raised his famous toast to the “Russian people” as the leading force of the Soviet Union.

This helped build the myth that Snow’s report challenged: the titanic struggle was not only “Russian glory.” It was, in a very large measure, a Ukrainian war.

This does not mean that other peoples did not fight or die. They did. But Ukraine’s price was too high to be dissolved into someone else’s political formula.

Modern Ukrainian memorial estimates often place Ukraine’s wartime losses at 8 to 10 million people. More cautious Western reference estimates may use a range of 5 to 7 million. The difference depends on methodology: whom one counts, which borders are used, whether one includes people born in Ukraine who died outside the republic, prisoners of war, civilians, victims of occupation, deportees, those who died from hunger and disease, and victims of repression.

But the core fact does not change: Ukraine was one of the main territories of human and material catastrophe in World War II.

If one compares the estimate of 8 to 10 million Ukrainian losses with the modern estimate of about 26.6 million total Soviet dead, Ukraine accounts for roughly 30 to 38 percent of the entire Soviet price of the war. That is not a marginal share. It is nearly a third, or more, of the Soviet tragedy.

The demographic blow is often estimated at up to 14 million people: Ukraine’s population fell from about 41 million in 1941 to about 27 million by 1945 — already taking into account the territories annexed by Stalin in 1939–1940. These were not only the dead. They were also the evacuated, the mobilized, the deported, forced laborers, refugees, displaced persons and people torn away from their former lives.

The destruction was immense: about 700 cities and towns, 28,000 villages, around 10 million people left without a roof over their heads, 18,000 medical institutions, 33,000 educational institutions and 16,000 industrial enterprises destroyed or heavily damaged. Ukraine’s economic losses amounted to about 42 percent of the total damage inflicted on the Soviet Union.

There is another important context that must not be skipped. For western Ukraine, the catastrophe did not begin only in 1941. In 1939, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the division of Poland between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, the USSR seized eastern Polish territories, including western Ukraine.

Soviet propaganda called it “reunification.” In reality, it was Stalinist annexation. New lands, cities and communities were pulled into the Ukrainian SSR. Ukrainians, Poles, Jews and others who had lived under a different political system suddenly faced Sovietization: arrests, deportations, nationalization, repression of political and social structures, and pressure on religious and cultural life.

This also matters for Jewish history. Before the war, around 1.5 million Jews lived in Soviet Ukraine. Beginning in 1939, after Stalin’s seizure of western Ukraine and the inclusion of additional territories in 1939–1940, the Jewish population within the expanded borders of Ukraine grew to about 2.4 million.

Then came the German invasion.

For Israel, this is the part of the story that must be named clearly. Ukraine was home to a vast map of Jewish life: Kyiv, Odesa, Lviv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Chernivtsi, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Berdychiv, Uman, Medzhybizh, Kamianets-Podilskyi, Rivne, Lutsk and many other cities and shtetls.

These were families, synagogues, schools, cemeteries, trades, markets, Hasidic traditions, Yiddish culture, Hebrew learning, Zionist ideas and secular Jewish life.

After the Nazi invasion, Jews became the target of the Holocaust — a specific policy of extermination.

Yet it is important to write this accurately. The Jews of Ukraine were not only victims of mass shootings. They also fought in the Red Army, served as doctors, engineers and signal operators, worked in the rear, fled into evacuation, entered ghettos, endured hunger, disease, forced labor, deportation, Soviet repression and the destruction of life like other inhabitants of Ukraine.

But as Jews, they faced the additional threat of complete annihilation.

Ukraine became one of the central territories of the “Holocaust by bullets.” Jews were often murdered near their homes — in ravines, forests, fields, quarries, anti-tank ditches and on the outskirts of towns.

Babyn Yar became the most famous symbol of this tragedy. On September 29–30, 1941, 33,771 Jews were shot in Kyiv. But Babyn Yar was not the only killing site. There were hundreds across Ukrainian soil.

Modern estimates speak of about 1.5 million Jews of Ukraine and Jews who found themselves on Ukrainian territory during the war who died as a result of the Holocaust and Nazi occupation policy — through mass shootings, ghetto conditions, hunger, disease, forced labor, deportations and the entire machinery of Nazi destruction.

If one compares roughly 1.5 million Jewish victims with the broader Ukrainian estimate of 8 to 10 million dead, Jewish victims account for about 15 to 19 percent of Ukraine’s wartime price. Jews, however, made up only about 5 to 6 percent of the population within Ukraine’s expanded borders.

This shows the disproportionate scale of the Jewish tragedy inside the broader Ukrainian catastrophe. But it does not replace the broader story. Ukraine, as a country and as a multiethnic human space, paid an enormous price for victory.

The postwar Soviet memory did not deal honestly with this complexity. It used the phrase “the Soviet people” — a formula that contained part of the truth, because many peoples did fight and die. But it also erased specifics.

The Ukrainian sacrifice was dissolved into general Soviet statistics. The Jewish sacrifice was often hidden behind the words “Soviet citizens.” At places where Jews were murdered specifically as Jews, Soviet memorial language often referred only to civilians, residents or peaceful citizens.

Then modern Russia made the distortion even cruder. “Soviet victory” became “Russian victory.”

Moscow now speaks of the 26.6 to 27 million Soviet dead but often frames this tragedy as if it were almost exclusively Russian sacrifice and Russian heroism. That is a historical lie.

Soviet losses were multiethnic. They included Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians, Russians, Kazakhs, Armenians, Georgians, Crimean Tatars, peoples of the Baltic states, the Caucasus, Central Asia and many others.

Today Russia uses the memory of World War II as a political resource it has seized inside itself. It appoints itself the only heir of the victory, speaks in the name of all the dead peoples of the USSR and turns a shared tragedy into an instrument of its present aggression against Ukraine. Memory of a war that should have warned against new conquest is being used to justify a new war — against the very country that paid one of the most terrible prices for the defeat of Nazism.

Russia now presents this victory almost exclusively as “its own.” It appoints itself the only descendant, heir and rights holder of the victory. In doing so, it turns other people’s blood, other people’s destroyed cities, other people’s graves and other people’s memory into an instrument of imperial propaganda.

It claims the Ukrainian ruins.

It claims Jewish graves.

It claims the soldiers of many nations.

It claims the memory of those who were hidden for decades behind the words “Soviet citizens.”

And it does so while waging a new war against Ukraine — a country that itself paid an enormous price for the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Victory cannot be privatized.

Grief cannot be appropriated.

Memory cannot be handed over to those who use the dead to justify a new war.

That is why this conversation matters for Israel. It is not only about Ukraine. It is about the Jewish dead of Ukraine, the families erased in ravines and ghettos, the soldiers and doctors who fought, the refugees who survived, and the names that Soviet memory tried to bury under a political formula.

To remember World War II honestly is to return history to those who paid for it.

And Ukraine paid.