World of Chig   

9.5.05
Kyiv -4

...and it seems appropriate to link two current themes today. Ukraine is inextricably linked to VE Day anyway, because Yalta, scene of the Yalta conference of February 1945, where Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin planned the end of hostilities, is in Ukraine (in the Crimean region).

Something which has surprised and shocked me though, is the assertion that Ukraine was possibly the country (although not an independent country at the time, due to Soviet rule then Nazi occupation) which suffered the heaviest loss of life in WWII. One website claims up to 20% of the WWII dead were Ukrainians.

According to this website about WWII in Ukraine:
"...the overwhelming brunt of the Nazi occupation between 1941 and 1944, as of the devastating Soviet reoccupation, was borne not by Russia but by the Baltic States, by Belarus, by Poland, and above all by Ukraine.... nowhere is it made clear that the largest number of civilian casualties in Europe were inflicted on the Ukrainians, millions of whom were killed both by the Nazis and by the Soviets. Thanks to persistent wartime prejudices, many British and Americans still harbor the illusion that most Ukrainians spent the war either as auxiliaries in the concentration camps or in the Waffen-SS Galizien....[but] the Waffen SS recruited three times as many Dutchmen as Ukrainians."
(New York Review of Books June 9, 1994, p. 23).


Back to the frivolous stuff tomorrow, including, on Europe Day, first reports from Chig's mates who have arrived in Kyiv already.


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