Once allies: Ukrainians and Russians fought in the World War II trenches together. For generations, they jointly commemorated the fallen under the banner “The Great Victory”. Photo: Presidential Office
May 1945 was the time when World War II ended in Europe. Ever since, May has been a month of commemoration and historical reconciliation for nations that lost millions of people in the inferno of WWII.
The shock of this unparalleled, barbaric, mind-boggling slaughter still lives in the blood and bones of all nations involved.
Sadly, in 2022, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine triggered those memories once again.
Eight decades ago, Ukraine was burnt down. Fully occupied by the Nazis, it lost at least eight million people — civilians and military personnel.
At least 2.5 million Ukrainian Red Army soldiers died fighting Hitler — more than all WWII military deaths of Americans, British and French soldiers combined.
There was not a single Ukrainian family, including mine, whose life was not crippled by that war.
Ukrainians and Russians fought in the WWII trenches together.
For generations, they jointly commemorated the fallen under the banner of what we called “The Great Victory”. All the more sacrilegious, then, was it when Vladimir Putin’s Russia started ferociously destroying Ukrainian cities and villages under the pretext of fighting fascism.
Commemorating the victims of the cruellest war of modernity is a noble, human thing. Using that sacrosanct memory to justify another war, almost as cruel, is a nearly diabolical one. Which Russia sadly does.
In Ukrainian Bucha, an occupied suburb of Kyiv, Russians went from house to house, killing civilian men of a certain age. How is that not a modern-day Einsatzgruppen operation?
Honouring the victims of WWII by putting the world on the verge of WWIII is sheer insanity.
Which is especially clear to Ukrainians who have had to survive horrific bombardments from Russia for the past four years. Thousands of destroyed homes and millions of destroyed lives — that is the real face of Putin’s “anti-fascism”.
It was Russia that attacked Ukraine, not the other way around.
It was Russia that made no secret of its imperialist plans to grab Ukrainian land.
It was Russia that created concentration camps for Ukrainian PoWs, like the infamous Olenivka in Donbas.
It was Russia that stole Ukrainian children and brainwashed them.
It was Russia that embraced an ideology picturing Ukrainians as an expendable nation deserving annihilation.
Eight decades ago, Ukraine was burnt down by the Germans and their allies.
Today, it is being burnt down by the Russians. This warrants the question: What does Russia celebrate on its “Victory Day” — victory over someone remarkably similar to what they are now and the end of a war remarkably similar to the war they themselves started?
On 9 May, Russians proudly carry portraits of their ancestors who gave their lives, along with millions of Ukrainians, when Hitler’s Germany started a war of conquest against the Soviet Union in 1941.
And yet they seem not to care about the people being slaughtered now, when Russia has started a bloody war of conquest of its own.
This brings us to a sad conclusion: this “commemoration” is not anti-war. It is not even a commemoration per se. On the contrary, it is an act of glorification of war, under the famous motto Mozhem povtorit! (We can do it again!).
For reference, Ukraine’s motto when commemorating the fallen of WWII is “Never again”.
May 9 has become a day when Russian imperial identity feels validated — if not by present achievements, then by borrowed glory.
That’s not commemoration. That is a wannabe empire feeding on its own mythology.
Dr Olexander Scherba is the ambassador of Ukraine to South Africa.