People & Histories
1939–45

Ukraine in the Second World War

Ukraine becomes one of the main battlefields and killing fields of the war, fought over by Soviet and Nazi armies and torn by its own conflicts.

Well established wartraumasoviet ruleidentity

Carved up, then overrun

In 1939 the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact let Stalin annex Polish-ruled western Ukraine, Galicia and Volhynia, and in 1940 Romanian-ruled northern Bukovyna. Soviet arrests and deportations followed.

  • Second World War (Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine) — Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (signed entries by subject specialists), Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (2024)
  • The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 — Timothy Snyder, Yale University Press (2003)
  • A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (2nd ed.) — Paul Robert Magocsi, University of Toronto Press (2010)
  • History of Ukraine (Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine) — Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (signed entries by subject specialists), Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (2024)
Germany invaded in June 1941, and by the end of that year it held almost all of Ukraine.
  • Holocaust (Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine) — Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (signed entries by subject specialists), Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (2024)
  • A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (2nd ed.) — Paul Robert Magocsi, University of Toronto Press (2010)
  • Ukraine: A History (4th ed.) — Orest Subtelny, University of Toronto Press (2009)
  • History of Ukraine (Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine) — Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (signed entries by subject specialists), Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (2024)

The occupation was murderous. Between 1.4 and 1.5 million Jews were killed in Ukraine, about two in three of those living there in 1941. Most were not deported to death camps but shot in mass executions near their homes.

  • Holocaust (Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine) — Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (signed entries by subject specialists), Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (2024)
  • Mass Shootings at Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2024)
  • A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (2nd ed.) — Paul Robert Magocsi, University of Toronto Press (2010)
The largest single massacre took place at Babyn Yar in Kyiv. Soviet prisoners of war were starved in open-air camps, and more than 1.3 million died in camps on Ukrainian soil.
  • Nazi war crimes in Ukraine (Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine) — Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (signed entries by subject specialists), Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (2024)
  • The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 — Timothy Snyder, Yale University Press (2003)
Over two million people were taken to Germany as forced labourers, the Ostarbeiter.
  • Second World War (Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine) — Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (signed entries by subject specialists), Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (2024)
  • Ukraine: A History (4th ed.) — Orest Subtelny, University of Toronto Press (2009)

Fighting on several sides

At least 4.5 million ethnic Ukrainians fought in the Red Army against Germany; Ukrainian estimates counting everyone mobilised from Ukraine run to 6–7 million.

In the west, the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), led by the Bandera wing of the OUN, clashed with the German occupiers, though in 1944 the OUN-B also negotiated and cooperated with German security services. It fought Soviet partisans and the Polish underground, and went on resisting Soviet rule into the early 1950s.
  • Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine) — Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (signed entries by subject specialists), Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (2024)
  • The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 — Timothy Snyder, Yale University Press (2003)
  • Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation — Serhy Yekelchyk, Oxford University Press (2007)
The UPA’s campaign against Polish civilians in Volhynia is among the darkest episodes of the war. As the Red Army returned, Stalin punished whole peoples, among them the Crimean Tatars.

The human cost was staggering. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine estimates that 6.8 million people from Ukraine were killed, soldiers and civilians of all nationalities, including the Jews murdered in the Holocaust, while Ukraine’s Institute of National Remembrance gives 8–10 million; figures vary with the borders and categories counted.

When the war ended, almost all ethnically Ukrainian lands had been united within the Ukrainian SSR, including Transcarpathia, ceded by Czechoslovakia in 1945, though some Ukrainian-inhabited areas remained in Poland and Czechoslovakia.
  • History of Ukraine (Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine) — Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (signed entries by subject specialists), Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (2024)
  • A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (2nd ed.) — Paul Robert Magocsi, University of Toronto Press (2010)
  • Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation — Serhy Yekelchyk, Oxford University Press (2007)

Remembering it

For decades the war was remembered in Soviet terms, as the “Great Patriotic War”. Eastern Ukraine held on to the memory of the Red Army and Soviet partisans, while western Ukraine honoured the UPA. In 2015 a law replaced the Soviet “Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945” with the “Second World War of 1939–1945” in official usage.

Many Ukrainians now mark 8–9 May as a day of remembrance rather than a Soviet-style victory parade.

The Russian state tells the story differently. It frames the war as the Soviet people’s Great Patriotic War, brands Ukrainian nationalism as Nazism, and in 2022 declared that it would “denazify” Ukraine.

How it's seen
Ukrainian memory today

Ukrainians fought and died against Nazism in vast numbers, mostly in the Red Army, while also suffering under Soviet rule. Memory has shifted from the Soviet "Great Patriotic War" to a European "Second World War" story that includes the nationalist underground.

The Russian state view

The Soviet people's "Great Patriotic War", with Russia at its centre. Ukrainian nationalists, and by extension today's Ukrainian state, are cast as "Nazis".

Why it matters today

Ukraine

The war is still a battlefield of memory. Ukrainians lost millions fighting Nazi Germany, mostly in the Red Army, so Russian claims to be fighting "Nazis" in Ukraine strike them as grotesque. At the same time the record of the nationalist underground, admired by many and condemned by others, divides Ukrainians from Poles and Jews and, to a lesser degree, from each other.