Earlier Russian forces fired rockets at the Ukrainian majuscule of Kyiv; seized Chernobyl, site of the world's worst nuclear accident; and attacked Ukraine's second-largest city, Kharkiv, Russian President Vladimir Putin shared some choice words.

In an essay published on the Kremlin's website in Russian, Ukrainian and English language terminal July, Putin credited Soviet leaders with inventing a Ukrainian commonwealth within the Soviet Union in 1922, forging a fictitious state unworthy of sovereignty out of historically Russian territory. After Ukraine declared its independence in 1991, the president argued, Ukrainian leaders "began to mythologize and rewrite history, edit out everything that united [Russia and Ukraine], and refer to the period when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Spousal relationship every bit an occupation."

The "historical reality" of mod-mean solar day Ukraine is more than circuitous than Putin's version of events, encompassing "a thousand-yr history of changing religions, borders and peoples," according to the New York Times. "[M]any conquests by warring factions and Ukraine'due south diverse geography ... created a complex textile of multiethnic states."

Residents of Kyiv leave the city following pre-offensive missile strikes by the Russian armed forces and Belarus on February 24, 2022.
Residents of Kyiv leave the city following pre-offensive missile strikes by Russian armed forces on February 24, 2022. Photo by Pierre Crom / Getty Images

Over the centuries, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, Poland, and Lithuania have all wielded jurisdiction over Ukraine, which first asserted its mod independence in 1917, with the formation of the Ukrainian People's Republic. Russia soon wrested back control of Ukraine, making it part of the newly established Soviet Union and retaining power in the region until World War II, when Germany invaded. The debate over how to remember this wartime history, besides as its implications for Ukrainian nationalism and independence, is key to understanding the electric current conflict.

In Putin's telling, the modern Ukrainian independence movement began not in 1917 merely during Globe War II. Under the German language occupation of Ukraine, between 1941 and 1944, some Ukrainian independence fighters aligned themselves with the Nazis, whom they viewed as saviors from Soviet oppression. Putin has drawn on this period in history to portray any Ukrainian button for sovereignty as a Nazi endeavor, says Markian Dobczansky, a historian at Harvard University's Ukrainian Inquiry Institute. "It'south actually but a stunningly cynical try to fight an information war and influence people's opinions," he adds.

Dobczansky is among a grouping of scholars who take publicly challenged Putin's version of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine and the years of Soviet dominion it's sandwiched between. Almost all of these experts begin their accounts with the fall of the Russian Empire, when tens of thousands of Ukrainians fought against the Bolshevik Red Regular army to establish the Ukrainian People's Democracy. Ukrainians connected to fight for independence until 1922, when they were defeated by the Soviets and became the Ukrainian Soviet Republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.Southward.R.). By leaving out Ukraine'south short-lived but hard-fought flow of independence in the early 20th century, Putin overlooks the state's sovereignty, says Dobczansky.

A nationalist rally in Kyiv in January 1917
A nationalist rally in Kyiv in January 1917 Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Also omitted from this version of events are the genocide and suppression that took place under Soviet rule—most famously the Bang-up Famine. Holodomor, which fuses the Ukrainian words for starvation and inflicting death, claimed the lives of around three.nine million people, or approximately xiii pct of the Ukrainian population, in the early 1930s. A man-made famine, information technology was the direct result of Soviet policies aimed at punishing Ukrainian farmers who fought Soviet mandates to collectivize. The Soviets besides waged an intense "Russification" campaign, persecuting Ukraine'southward cultural elite and elevating Russian linguistic communication and culture above all others.

When Germany invaded in 1941, some Ukrainians, especially those in western Ukraine, saw them as liberators, says Oxana Shevel, a political scientist at Tufts University. The Ukrainians didn't particularly want to live under the Germans and then much as escape the Soviets, adds Shevel, who is the president of the nonprofit educational organization American Association for Ukrainian Studies.

"The broader objective was to establish an independent state, simply in the procedure, [Ukrainians] too engaged in participation in the Holocaust," she says.

The question for Shevel is how to treat this history. From the Soviet signal of view that Putin still embraces, information technology's simple, she says: The Holocaust bated, Ukrainian nationalists were "bad guys" because "they fought the Soviet state." Putin and other critics frequently describe on Ukrainians' wartime collaboration with the Nazis to baselessly narrate the modern country every bit a Nazi nation; in a Feb 24 oral communication, the Russian president accounted the "demilitarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine" fundamental goals of the invasion.

Locals work to erect huge anti-tank traps in December 1941, during the Nazi invasion of Ukraine.
Locals cock huge anti-tank traps during the Nazi invasion of Ukraine in 1941. Photo by Bettmann Archive via Getty Images

From the Ukrainian side of the debate, the country's wartime history is more complex. Are the nationalists "bad guys" because they participated in the Holocaust, Shevel asks, or "good guys" considering they fought for independence?

For Putin, even raising this question is inflammatory. "Any kind of reevaluation of the Soviet handling of history is what Putin would consider [a] Nazi approach or Nazification," says Shevel.

To deny the claim that Ukraine is a Nazi state isn't to downplay the Nazis' wartime actions in Ukraine. Natalie Belsky, a historian at the University of Minnesota Duluth, points out that one of the biggest massacres of the Holocaust took identify just outside of Kyiv. Between 1941 and 1943, the Nazis—aided by local collaborators—shot around lxx,000 to 100,000 people, many of them Jews, at Babyn Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv. According to the National WWII Museum, ane in every four Jewish victims of the Holocaust was murdered in Ukraine.

While Germans oft recall of Earth War 2 as a fight against the Russians, the bulk of the fighting actually took place in modern-solar day Ukraine and Belarus, equally well as large parts of western Russia, says Dobczansky. Under the High german occupation, several million Ukrainians were sent to Deutschland to work on farms and in factories. Still, considering the Nazi racial bureaucracy placed Ukrainians in a higher place Russians, the Nazis made a limited attempt to promote Ukrainian national culture in occupied territories—a move that, in turn, helped bring some of the Ukrainian nationalist movement to the German side.

"Those [nationalist] groups certainly had anti-Semitic elements," says Belsky. "Just [they] essentially felt that, or judged that, they were more than probable to get Ukrainian independence under Nazi occupation than nether Soviet occupation."

Motorized infantry of the German armed forces advance into Ukraine during World War II.
Motorized infantry of the German armed forces accelerate into Ukraine during Globe War 2. Photo past Hulton Archive / Getty Images

The Nazis, she says, promised Ukrainian nationalists as much—at least afterwards the state of war. Only even before their defeat by the Allies in 1945, the Germans turned on some of their Ukrainian allies, including one of the country's most famous independence fighters, Stepan Bandera. In his fight against the Soviets, Bandera aligned himself with the Germans, simply to end up in a concentration army camp afterward he refused to rescind a proclamation of Ukrainian statehood in 1941. Released in 1944 to help the Nazis boxing the Soviets again, Bandera survived the war, only to be poisoned by the KGB in 1959. In 2010, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko awarded Bandera the championship of "Hero of Ukraine," but the honor was annulled a year later.

"This [reexamination of Ukrainian participation in wartime atrocities] has prompted a relatively difficult dialogue in Ukraine almost the issue of complicity," says Belsky.

Putin has referenced Ukrainian nationalists in service of his own political agenda of portraying modern Ukrainians every bit Nazis. Prior to Russia'south 2014 invasion of Crimea, many Ukrainians viewed Bandera and other freedom fighters in a less favorable light, says Shevel. Later, however, she noticed a shift, with these individuals, some of whom fought alongside the Nazis, being called heroes. The Soviets, once held up as liberators from the Nazis, were now the bad guys again.

Pro-Russian rebels allegedly move tanks and heavy weaponry away from the front line of fighting in accordance with the Minsk II agreement on February 26, 2015, in Chervonoe, Ukraine.
Pro-Russian rebels allegedly move tanks and heavy weaponry abroad from the front end line in accordance with the Minsk II agreement on February 26, 2015, in Chervonoe, Ukraine. Photo by Andrew Burton / Getty Images

Bandera may no longer be an official hero of Ukraine, just his memory and that of other 20th-century independence fighters endure. In 2015, Ukraine passed a series of decommunization laws calling for the removal of communist monuments and the renaming of public spaces in honor of Ukrainian nationalists and nationalist organizations, including those known to accept participated in the Holocaust. The legislation has received pushback from scholars who come across it as whitewashing, or ignoring the nighttime sides of these movements and their activities.

Shevel agrees that a complete reversal in framing is "probably not the best outcome." Although the previous Soviet narrative was very one-sided, she cautions confronting replacing it with an equally one-sided narrative that labels Ukrainian nationalists unconditional good guys. Either way, Shevel says, the issue is 1 that should be debated internally, non by a foreign invader: "It's problematic, but information technology's a domestic contend."

Dobczansky, for his part, believes Ukraine is entitled to its own version of history and that Ukrainians should be allowed to cull how to nowadays their own experiences. He praises local researchers' efforts to study the Holocaust and open up their archives and notes that Ukraine'southward current president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish.

"Ukraine has begun the procedure of confronting the darkest pages of its past," he says.

A crowd holds a demonstration outside of the Soviet headquarters in Kyiv in September 1991, after Ukraine declared its independence.
A crowd holds a demonstration exterior of the Soviet headquarters in Kyiv in September 1991, after Ukraine declared its independence. Photo by Alain Nogues / Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images

In today'due south charged atmosphere, proverb anything critical nearly Ukrainian nationalism or calling attention to Ukrainian nationalists' involvement with the Nazis tin can exist seen as supporting Russian federation's delineation of Ukraine every bit a Nazi nation, Belsky notes.

This Russian narrative is nothing new. Instead, says Dobczansky, information technology'south part of a long-term Russian data war on Ukraine. Putin's ahistorical justifications of the invasion doesn't surprise the scholar. What does surprise him is the outpouring of support he'southward seen for Ukraine, with even "Sabbatum Dark Alive" paying tribute to the beleaguered nation.

Dobczansky theorizes that the outraged response to the invasion is tied to society's relatively recent reexamination of colonialism. Because Ukraine was successfully integrated into the Soviet Union after World War II, Dobczansky doesn't come across the menses leading up to Ukrainian independence in 1991 equally an occupation so much as a relationship between a colony and a colonizer. By waging war on Ukraine, Putin is, in essence, trying to concur onto a colony.

"[Russian leaders] basically don't recognize any Ukrainian historical agency except the bureau that they imagined for them," says Dobczansky.

Ukraine—and the world—seem to be imagining something dissimilar.

Katya Cengel writes near her time reporting from Ukraine earlier this century in her honor-winning 2019 memoir, From Chernobyl with Love.

Recommended Videos