Ukraine removed from rewritten history of WWII as Russia tries to justify its full-scale invasion
While claiming to be ‘fighting distortion of history’, the current Russian regime has removed any mention of Ukraine from its official list of countries involved in the victory over Nazi Germany. Moscow is willing to desecrate the memory of millions of Ukrainian soldiers who fought for victory, and those who lost their lives, in order to push a narrative aimed at justifying its war of aggression against Ukraine. Any western leaders taking part in Moscow’s Victory Day ceremony on 9 May 2025 will be complicit in these lies.
The independent Russian media Agentstvo noted the omissions on Russia’s newly launched website for the 80th anniversary of Victory over Nazi Germany. The failure to mention Ukraine is all the more absurd (as well as offensive) given that four Ukrainian cities – Kyiv; Odesa; Kerch; and Sevastopol - are mentioned in another part of the site as ‘hero-cities’ for their role in the War.
In fact, Agentstvo first reported the same distortion in the compulsory propaganda lessons ‘Conversations about important things’ planned for the 79th anniversary of Victory Day on 9 May 2024. Teachers were supposed to list the “peoples of the Soviet Union who had fought fascism”, with Ukrainians not mentioned.
The list also fails to mention Crimean Tatars. In comparison with the number of ethnic Ukrainians, or of residents of Soviet Ukraine altogether, the number of Crimean Tatars in the Soviet Army may have been significantly smaller, however the reasons for not mentioning them are not dissimilar. Joseph Stalin perpetuated a lie about ‘Crimean Tatar collaborators’ as claimed justification for the 1944 Deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar people, a crime recognized as genocide in Ukraine. Although the Soviet regime later admitted that this had been a fake pretext, the current Russian regime is increasingly muffling all of Stalin’s crimes, including the Deportation.
It is Putin’s regime that has sought to distort history, with respect to Ukraine, including the role of Ukrainian soldiers in WWII. Unlike Ukraine, Putin’s Russia has reinstated the term used in Soviet times, i.e. ‘the Great Patriotic War’. The latter title has the advantage for Moscow of referring only to the period from 22 June 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded Soviet Ukraine, and leaving out almost two years of WWII when Stalin’s Soviet Union collaborated with Nazi Germany. Several Russians have even faced criminal prosecution for writing or reposting material stating, quite correctly, that Stalin and Hitler were allies.
While the current regime muffles any details which cloud its propaganda hype about the War, failure to mention those first 22 months serves another purpose also. The invasion on 17 September 1939 of Western Ukraine, which was then part of Poland, can be brushed over, as can be the Soviet invasion of the three Baltic Republics. It was, in large measure, due to the atrocities committed by the Soviet NKVD after these invasions that many Ukrainians and peoples of the Baltic Republics were either ready to fight both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany or, in some cases, join Nazi divisions.
With respect to Ukraine, Moscow has heavily pushed a narrative that presents all Ukrainians, or at least, all Ukrainian nationalists, as having ‘collaborated with the Nazis’. Russia, however, vastly exaggerates the number of actual collaborators and glosses over the fact that the key Ukrainian nationalists who originally viewed the Nazis as possible allies against Stalin changed their stand very soon. It furthermore ignores the entire Ukrainian units and large Ukrainian presence in Soviet units fighting the Nazis from 1941 to the end of the War,
In her article Without Ukraine, there would have been no victory. What exactly is Russia’s lie regarding World War II?, Yana Prymachenko suggests that it was after the Orange Revolution in 2005 and the Kremlin’s failure to install ‘its candidate’ (Victor Yanukovych) that “Russia began using the memory of World War II as an instrument of its aggression”. Ukraine, with its pro-Europe leanings, was gradually “excluded from the list of winners” (in the War).
During the following years, far-right Russian nationalist movements, including those linked with Alexander Dugin and his Eurasian supremacy ideology and wish to restore the Russian empire, actively sought followers in Ukraine as well. It was no accident that some of the so-called ‘Donetsk separatists’ who came to the fore in 2014, such as Pavel Gubarev, had been a member of the neo-Nazi, chauvinist Russian National Unity movement. The same was true of many of the Russians who were sent into Donetsk oblast to seize control after the Moscow-prompted ‘people’s uprisings’ in Ukrainian cities fizzled so badly.
All of this was, of course, ignored by Moscow, with the Kremlin’s attempts to justify its invasion of Crimea and military aggression in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, including Putin’s claim that Kyiv had been taken over by ‘fascist, anti-Semitic hordes”. These, it should be stressed, were categorically condemned by Ukrainian Jewish leaders. Local Jewish communities were vigilant over the following years in debunking Russian propaganda efforts to claim fictitious ‘pogroms’, etc. So too were researchers, like Viacheslav Likhachev, who monitored and reported Ukraine’s consistently low levels of anti-Semitic violence, graffiti, etc.
Despite all of this, and the fact that Ukrainians had overwhelmingly elected a Ukrainian Jewish President, Putin dragged out all the same lies in February 2022, claiming that his full-scale invasion of Ukraine was aimed at the “demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.”
None of this should be ignored, as Moscow is spending vast amounts of money on pushing such propaganda and, in particular, on brainwashing children, both at home and on occupied Ukrainian territory. They too are told that Russia was ‘forced’ to invade (in Russian Newspeak, to begin its ‘special military operation’) because theWest were supporting “a fascist coup in Kyiv”. All of these efforts are, among other things, aimed at instilling the diseased lie that Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is like victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 and at erasing Ukraine’s role in the latter.
See also:
Ukraine ‘began the war against Russia’ in Moscow’s official school history textbook