The memory of the Second World War remains one of the most tragic and sensitive topics in European and Ukrainian society. It is deeply rooted in personal and family histories, but at the same time inextricably linked to geopolitical processes and manipulations. In different countries, this topic has its own accents, but everywhere it is united by one thing – the scale of the tragedy that changed human history, leaving behind millions of dead, devastated cities and generations that could not recover from what they experienced. And that is why the question of how we remember that war, how we talk about it today, in what words and in what context, is extremely important. It determines not only the attitude towards the past, but also the ability of modern society to maintain respect for the facts, people and values for which too high a price was paid. Today, when war is again raging on Ukrainian soil, the events of 1939–1945 sound like an answer to the question of what happens when evil is not stopped. That is why memory and myth, experience and manipulation, history and its political use should be distinguished.
80 years later: silence after the shot as a memory of the war
Eighty years ago, on May 8, 1945, the fighting in Europe ended. On the ruins of burned cities, among millions of murdered, deported, enslaved people, the news of the capitulation of Nazi Germany was heard. This day did not mark peace as an end, but silence after a terrible catastrophe – without final healing, but with the first breath of hope. And although joy resounded in many capitals of the world at that time, and crowds of people took to the streets to celebrate, the historical memory of the Second World War was never easy.
Ukraine, which lost millions of its citizens in this war — on the fronts, in camps, in bombings, in forced displacements and terror — remembered this war in a different narrative for decades. But since 2015, and finally after the adoption of the 2023 law, the country has chosen a different way of commemoration, consistent with the European experience. It is on May 8 that the feat of all fighters against Nazism is commemorated, regardless of army, nationality or status. And it is on this day that not only those who won are remembered, but also those who were taken away by the war – the fallen, the tortured and the missing.
Introduced by the UN General Assembly in 2004 as the Day of Remembrance and Reconciliation, May 8 gradually became a day of mourning, a form of humanity’s collective ethical response to war. For a long time, Ukrainian society came to its own interpretation of this date, overcoming internal contradictions – between the habit of celebrating May 9 and a new perspective. For decades, May 9 existed as an official holiday – Victory Day, it was an opportunity to honor grandfathers and great-grandfathers who returned from the front, who did not return, who passed through concentration camps, who survived the evacuation or survived the occupation. Memory was transmitted in stories, photographs, awards, lunch with front-line porridge and combat 100 grams, fresh flowers and a moment of silence at memorials and near monuments. For many Ukrainians, especially the older generation, this day has remained an important tradition to this day, a symbol of respect for family history. For them, changing the date is often perceived as offensive.
However, the other position also gradually grew – especially after 2014, and finally after the full-scale invasion of Russia in 2022. Ukrainians began to question the manner in which and in what words this victory is commemorated. Because behind the facade of the Great Victory too often other things are hidden for them – repression, camps, returning from the front not to freedom, but to a new dictatorship. Therefore, for a part of society, May 9 became a symbol of distorted history and Soviet mythology, used as a tool of propaganda. They talk about the need to cleanse the memory of lies and old ideology. There is still no point of agreement between these two approaches, so some remain in the format of private commemoration, while others seek a new language of memory that would correspond to the current experience of war and the modern vision of history. In this there is a conflict of traditions, a complex process of changing the ideology of a society that is learning to see itself and its history in a new way.
Today, when Ukraine is at war again, the memory of 1939–1945 is no longer exclusively historical. It becomes a sharp line of parallel — again destroyed cities, deportations, mass murders, and again the struggle for survival. But it is precisely this parallel that makes May 8 a request for rethinking: what is the price of war and why even the defeat of totalitarianism does not guarantee that it will not return.
The historical truth about the role and losses of Ukraine in the Second World War
The modern political and media space is increasingly becoming a field for historical claims. Various states try to declare their “decisive” role in the victory over Nazism, interpreting it as part of national prestige or an instrument of influence. This trend has especially intensified in recent decades: every country that participated in the war seeks to assert its exclusivity in this victory. What is more, in public discourses there are statements that are based more on geopolitical ambitions than on historical facts. This approach risks marginalizing the real victims, experiences, losses and complexity of the situations.
In fact, no state has a moral right to claim a monopoly in the assessment of that war. The victory over Nazism was the result of an incredibly complex and large-scale resistance, the efforts of dozens of countries, hundreds of peoples and millions of individual human destinies. In this struggle, there was no single center or linear division into major and minor. Victory was a shared responsibility, a collective feat and a catastrophic sacrifice. However, for Ukraine, participation in the Second World War became a total comprehensive destruction with an unprecedented number of victims, scale of destruction, depth of humanitarian disaster.
It was on Ukrainian lands that some of the fiercest battles of this war took place. Tank breakthroughs, mass offensives, encirclement, defensive operations — all this passed through Kharkiv, Kyiv, Odesa, Dnipro, Crimea, Donbas, Lviv, Zhytomyr, and Poltava. These names were heard again and again in front reports. Ukraine was not a rear, but a real battlefield that devastated everything: infrastructure, industry, villages, fields, entire districts. The population then experienced large-scale physical destruction, deportations, forced labor and occupation terror. According to various estimates, in total, victims of the Second World War were from 50 to 85 million people in different parts of the world, while the losses of Ukraine are from 8 to 10 million people – both Ukrainians and representatives of other nationalities who lived in Ukraine. This is about a quarter of the pre-war population. We are talking not only about the dead soldiers, but also millions of civilians – killed during shelling, shot in cities and villages, murdered in concentration camps, taken to forced labor in the Third Reich. Death and loss were everywhere. There was no region, no family that this war would have bypassed. And this is the tragedy of the Ukrainian war experience – it was all-encompassing.
The participation of Ukrainians in the armed struggle against the Nazi coalition deserves special attention. Millions of Ukrainians fought in the Red Army — according to various estimates, no less than 6 million. But the participation of Ukrainians was not limited to the Soviet Army. The Ukrainian diaspora actively participated in the struggle on the side of the Allies. 112,000 ethnic Ukrainians fought in the Polish Army, up to 80,000 in the US Armed Forces, about 45,000 in the British and Canadian armies, and 6,000 in the French. All these people contributed to the fight against fascism, regardless of political affiliation or passport. They were part of the global resistance, and their presence in the Allied armies is further evidence that victory cannot be claimed by any one country.
At the same time, concentration camps became one of the tragic dimensions of that war. In Ukraine, the Nazis created hundreds of camps for various purposes, from labor to death camps. The fact of the existence of camps for Soviet prisoners of war, where the death rate was extremely high, is particularly difficult. According to experts, more than a million prisoners of Ukrainian origin died in such camps. At the same time, one of the most famous is the Groslazaret in the Khmelnytskyi region, it left behind documented evidence of horror: the death record books kept by the prisoners themselves. Recorded over 20,000 deaths with names, professions, place of birth, this is a living archive of the disaster, during which most people died in unbearable conditions of hunger, disease, torture, medical experiments and inhumane hard work.
The German occupation of Ukraine turned out to be one of the most brutal in all of Europe. If in France, Denmark or Belgium, the Nazis mainly exercised administrative control, then on the Ukrainian lands the policy of genocide was implemented. It was here that mass executions of civilians, burning of villages, executions of hostages, and practices of total terror took place. It was in Ukraine, on the territory of the then Reichskommissariat of Ukraine, that the Holocaust acquired an industrial scale: Babyn Yar, Drobytskyi Yar, Kamianets-Podilskyi, Bohdanivka — these are only separate pages of a large-scale crime against humanity. People who survived the occupation perceived liberation as a chance to survive, as an end to the round-the-clock threat of physical destruction. It was joy with a taste of mourning, because there was often nowhere to return, because there was a new repressive reality of the Stalinist regime.
And that is why today it is important not only to honor the victory, but also to understand it correctly. Not because of slogans, but complex, contradictory, deeply personal stories. Ukraine was not a background, an auxiliary force, and not a passive victim. It was one of the central arenas of that war, with millions of dead, millions of fighters, hundreds of destroyed cities, thousands of concentration camps and nameless mass graves. This truth cannot be reduced to political competition or limited to “contribution to the common cause.” It belongs to the dead and binds the living to tell the truth. And we should not allow ourselves or others to forget it.
The war after the victory: when the memory did not preserve
The world that arose from the ruins of the Second World War was built on a simple but fundamental idea: armed aggression, incitement to hatred, mass killings of civilians and war crimes must remain in the past as unconditional evil. The Nuremberg Tribunal not only condemned fascist criminals, but also laid the moral and legal foundation for a new era – where the value of human life, the inviolability of borders and responsibility for crimes were to become universal principles.
This order was maintained for decades. Despite regional conflicts, the global security system remained at least declaratively faithful to the lessons of the Second World War, but in 2022 Russia destroyed this fragile balance. Its full-scale invasion of Ukraine became not just a war against a sovereign state, but a direct challenge to the post-war architecture of the world — the one that was supposed to deter aggression and protect civilians. It was the revival of an ideology in which the neighbor is turned into a “wrong”, human life into a consumable, and international law into a tool for justifying violence. Russia returned to public use the rhetoric of “internal enemies”, “national mission”, “historic territories” – all that was already a well-known tool of genocidal policy in Europe in the middle of the 20th century.
At the same time, with these words came actions. Mass killings of military and civilians, including children, infiltration camps, torture, deportation of children, shelling of residential areas, destroyed hospitals and schools – not as random tragedies, but as a systematic practice of warfare. Deliberate humiliation, depersonalization, violence against the civilian population – exactly what was called a crime against humanity in 1945, has once again become an everyday reality. What seemed to be the past turned out to be modern. Russia not only violated international law, it made a mockery of the very idea of a common moral consensus after 1945. And that is why the war in Ukraine is another history lesson.
Today, there are almost no people left among us who personally went through the Second World War. Every year, the voices of people who met the war in their youth – fifteen-year-old orderlies, seventeen-year-old riflemen, eighteen-year-old cadets – fade away. They remembered her not from textbooks or newsreels, but from their own tired hands, nights under artillery fire, faces of comrades who did not return from the battlefield. These people lived for long decades with the only simple hope that what they experienced would never happen again.
Many of them sincerely believed in the main slogan of that era – “Never again!”. It seemed to them that the experience was so horrific, so obviously senseless in its cruelty, that humanity would not allow anything like it to happen again. All the more so – between the peoples who together bore the burden of that war. Between those who stood together in a single trench, liberated concentration camps, carried the wounded from the battlefield. They could not even imagine that in a few decades one of the armies of that former joint victory would come with tanks on the land of another. That those who until recently were called “brotherly people” will become a source of new terror – no longer under the banner of the swastika, but with the same disdain for human life, the same rhetoric about the “great historical mission”, the same devastating desire to conquer, humiliate, erase. They could not imagine that rockets from Moscow and Belgorod would hit the residential quarters of Kyiv and Kharkiv, and the words “denazification” would be used not to condemn the past, but as an excuse for the present murders.
Their common graves are found in dozens of cemeteries in Europe, in mass graves and nameless trenches. All of them, both Russians and Ukrainians, were participants in the same war, which was called the Great. And all of them, if they had a voice, would never have allowed this modern war, would not have said anything about geopolitical interests, “sphere of influence” or “historical justice.” However, now they are almost gone, and those who remain are once again living through modern warfare, and are being shot at by the grandchildren of their former comrades-in-arms.
A memory that hurts: the modern shadow of Nazism and the controversy surrounding the monuments
The Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler (who won power at the head of his party in 1933), were particularly brutal. The concepts of the Nazi Party contradicted all the current principles of humanism, because they divided the nations of the world into “superior” and “inferior” races, claiming that the “superior” races had a justified right to conquer and even destroy other peoples and those who did not fit into the certain framework of society imposed by them: people with a different worldview, with certain health deficiencies, etc.
In 1945, the world hoped that with the surrender of the Third Reich, Nazism itself would disappear as an ideology, political practice and source of hatred. The Nazi state machine was destroyed, its leaders were convicted, and the very idea of racial supremacy, aggressive revanchism, and justified white genocide was officially outlawed. However, in reality, unfortunately, Nazism did not disappear.
Today, eight decades after the end of the Second World War, there are still organizations in the world that directly or indirectly profess the Nazi ideology. They bear different names, operate under legal restrictions, often disguise themselves as “nationalist” or “traditionalist” movements, but their essence remains the same – the promotion of hatred, discrimination, and violence as the norm. Many of these structures are formally banned in most countries of the world, but in some countries the ban is only declarative: the symbols and language of Nazism continue to circulate in the public space, in particular on the Internet. Paradoxically, while denying the participation of their own country in the crimes of the past, individual governments today reproduce the logic of Hitlerism in new forms – through aggression, militarism, denial of the right of other peoples to exist.
The Ukrainian experience is particularly tragic in this context, because on the one hand, Ukrainians fought against Nazism on the fronts, in allied armies, underground, and in camps. On the other hand, today Russia itself, which for decades appropriated the victory of 1945, itself shows signs of the same ideology with which it supposedly fought. Public calls for the “liquidation of the Ukrainian nation”, depersonalization of the enemy, mass killings of the civilian population, deportation of children, justification of the invasion with pseudo-historical myths – all these are not rhetorical figures, but modern reality.
Against this background, the dispute in society about World War II monuments in Ukraine has become even more complicated. The dismantling of Soviet monuments, including those related to the theme of war, does not just divide politicians – it divides families, generations and memory. On the one hand, these monuments were erected during the time of Soviet power with a specific ideological narrative, where the main figure was always a Soviet soldier, often nameless, always under a red flag. But on the other hand, the bodies of fallen Ukrainians lie under these monuments. Those who really went through the war died near Stalingrad, on the Kursk arc, in Berlin. Who did not choose in which army to fight, but chose to defend his Motherland. For many, these monuments have not become political objects, but a place of personal mourning. This is the place where Ukrainians remember their parents and grandfathers who died in that war. And therefore the question of their demolition cannot be justified.
This creates deep tension and division in society. Some demand a complete cleansing of the public space from the symbols of the past, seeing them as tools of ideological enslavement of Soviet times and the narrative of the Russian Federation. At the same time, others see them as an important part of family memory, honoring dead parents and grandfathers. The gap between these polarly different positions can only be resolved by a reasonable compromise, because it is a painful experience for many Ukrainians. Where graves and human memory are concerned, there should be gratitude and respect for those who fought. Their feat cannot be forgotten, future generations must know about it. Because he who does not remember his past has no future. That is why a radical solution to this issue is a road to a dead end, it requires a thoughtful approach and the truth.
