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The Forgotten Front: Ukraine in World War II, Between Nazis and Soviets

  • Writer: Matthew Parish
    Matthew Parish
  • 6 days ago
  • 5 min read


World War II is often remembered in Europe through the lens of Allied triumph, resistance to Nazism and the horrors of the Holocaust. But in Ukraine, the war was not merely a battle between good and evil—it was a cataclysm of competing occupations, forced loyalties and national trauma. Between the advancing Nazis and returning Soviets, Ukraine became one of the bloodiest and most brutal battlegrounds of the 20th century.


For Ukrainians, the war did not begin in 1939 and end in 1945. Nor was it a fight in which they had much agency. Instead Ukraine was a land of double occupation—first under Stalin, then Hitler, then Stalin again. Each regime brought terror. Each imposed violence on the population. And each demanded total submission. To understand Ukraine’s position in World War II is to confront one of the most painful, misunderstood and politically weaponised histories in Europe.


1939–1941: Caught in the Pact


In September 1939, following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly invaded Poland. This secret agreement effectively partitioned Ukrainian lands, with eastern Galicia and Volhynia absorbed into Soviet Ukraine. For many western Ukrainians—who had lived under Polish rule in the interwar period—this was their first contact with Soviet power.


What followed was not liberation, but mass repression. The Soviet NKVD arrested tens of thousands of political opponents, Polish officials, Ukrainian nationalists, clergy and ordinary citizens. Entire families were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan. When German forces invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, retreating Soviet agents executed thousands of political prisoners en masse in cities like Lviv and Lutsk—leaving behind mutilated corpses and seared memories.


For many Ukrainians in the west, the arrival of the Wehrmacht (the Armed Forces of Nazi Germany) was at first greeted with relief—until it became clear that Nazi occupation would prove even more horrific.


1941–1944: Under the Swastika


German occupation of Ukraine brought genocidal policies and unprecedented brutality. The Nazi regime viewed Ukraine as Lebensraum—living space for Germans—and planned to depopulate large swathes of its territory. Over 1.5 million Jews were murdered on Ukrainian soil, many in mass shootings carried out by Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads in Nazi Germany) and local collaborators, most infamously at Babyn Yar near Kyiv.



Millions more Ukrainians were exploited as forced labourers, or Ostarbeiter, deported to Germany. Ukrainian peasants were starved, villages razed, and partisans executed en masse. The scale of Nazi repression rivalled that of Stalin’s earlier purges.


Some Ukrainians, seeking to resist both occupiers, formed nationalist movements like the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Their role remains deeply controversial: they fought against both Nazis and Soviets, but were also responsible for ethnic cleansing, especially against Poles in Volhynia and Galicia.


Others joined the Red Army, or were conscripted into Nazi auxiliary units, or tried simply to survive. For most Ukrainians, there was no “right” side—only the choice between terror and survival.


1944–1945: Liberation or Occupation?


As the Red Army pushed westward in 1944, many Ukrainians feared the return of Stalin’s regime as much as they had feared the Germans. Soviet “liberation” was accompanied by renewed arrests, deportations and executions. Anyone suspected of collaboration—or even of having survived the German occupation without sufficient suffering—was vulnerable.


Western Ukraine became a battleground between Soviet forces and Ukrainian nationalist partisans, some of whom continued to fight until the early 1950s. The NKVD, Stalin's secret police, waged a brutal counterinsurgency campaign, crushing dissent and enforcing ideological conformity. Villages were burned, suspected sympathisers executed, and survivors sent to the gulag. In total, approximately 25% of the population of Ukraine died in World War II.



Meanwhile Soviet historiography would later cast Ukraine’s role in the war solely in terms of Red Army heroism and “brotherly unity” with Russia—erasing the complexities, divisions, and independent Ukrainian agency. The war was used to justify Soviet dominance, while Ukrainian suffering was repackaged as proof of loyalty to Moscow.


A Sympathetic Reckoning


Today, independent Ukraine is re-examining its wartime history with new eyes—seeking to honour the victims of both Nazi and Soviet repression, and to restore memory to those denied it for decades. Museums, memorials, and archives across the country are reopening painful conversations: about the Holocaust, about resistance, about complicity, and about the impossibility of easy choices.


This reckoning does not aim to glorify one side or whitewash the other. Rather it seeks to understand how ordinary people survived the unthinkable. How entire villages disappeared. How young men were drafted into one army and later persecuted by another. How Ukraine was not the author of the war, but one of its greatest victims.


As war once again visits Ukraine in the 21st century, the echoes of the 1940s are impossible to ignore. Once more, Ukrainians face existential violence. Once more, their history is distorted by foreign powers. And once more, they resist—not for ideology, but for the right to determine their own future.


Memory in a Contested Land


Ukraine’s experience in World War II is not a neat tale of good versus evil. It is a story of betrayal, resilience and survival in a land used as a battleground by greater empires. The war left no family untouched. And its memory still shapes how Ukrainians understand violence, nationhood and sovereignty today.


To tell this story sympathetically is not to erase its complexities. It is to insist that Ukraine’s past belongs to its people—not to the victors who tried to write it for them.


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Suggested Reading List


  1. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

    Offers a masterful account of the interlocking genocides under Nazi and Soviet regimes in Ukraine and neighbouring regions.

    .

  2. The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy

    A sweeping history with a vivid chapter on WWII and how Ukraine became the epicentre of competing totalitarian powers.

      .

  3. Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel by Anatolii Kuznetsov

    A powerful eyewitness memoir from a Kyiv teenager who witnessed one of the worst massacres carried out by Nazi forces during the war.

      .

  4. Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum

    Examines the Soviet-engineered Holodomor and shows its relation to broader Soviet wartime repression.

      .

  5. Zero Point Ukraine: Four Essays on World War II (Ukrainian Voices) edited by Olena Stiazhkina

    A collection offering nuanced Ukrainian perspectives, challenging the Soviet “Great Patriotic War” narrative.

      .

  6. Sketches from a Secret War by Timothy Snyder

    Although focused on interwar Poland and Soviet Ukraine, it provides essential background on region-wide shifts leading into WWII.

      .

  7. Stalingrad by Antony Beevor

    A definitive account of the Eastern Front’s centrality, illustrating the massive scale of the conflict that devastated Ukraine.


 
 

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