Russian Invasion Revives Memories Of World War II In Ukraine

Kyiv, Ukraine — Billboards on the streets of Kyiv these days are playing the opening verse of a 1942 Soviet song about the German invasion.

“On June 22, at exactly 4 am, Kyiv was bombed, and we were told that the war had begun,” the message says.

Russia’s war with Ukraine also began with the bombardment of Kyiv shortly after 4 am, which did not escape the attention of its inhabitants. About eight million Ukrainians died in World War II, a conflict that devastated the country and, like in Russia, remains in the collective memory.

Now that Ukrainian cities are being bombarded by deadly Russian artillery and air strikes in a way that Europe has not seen since the 1940s, the memory of that pain serves as a starting point for many Ukrainians.

Streets that were filled with trendy shops, fusion restaurants and busy bars two weeks ago now have anti-tank obstacles, trenches and sandbags. Residents say the city’s new look reminds them of what it looked like in black-and-white newsreels of the 1940s. Only now it is colored and real.

“The war that Russia is waging here is not a war of the 21st century, but rather a war of the 20th century,” said Ukrainian writer Andrei Kurkov, who writes in Russian. “Tanks, bombardments, destruction of cities. The style of war is the same as in World War II, so it makes sense that people started using the same terms. Today, Russians are fascists, and we are defending our homeland.”

The losses, at least so far, are not comparable to the horrors of the 1940s, when the Holocaust followed the Nazi conquests. But President Vladimir Zelensky, the Jewish grandson of a Soviet World War II veteran, has already revived the old Soviet practice of bestowing the title of hero city on cities that fiercely resisted foreign invaders. This weekend, he gave the title to Kharkov, Chernigov, Mariupol, Kherson, Volnovakha and Gostomel, whose mayor was executed by the Russians.

A victim of shelling in Irpen on Sunday.

Photo: Manu Brabo for The Wall Street Journal

He also began to refer to the Soviet term for World War II, the Great Patriotic War. “For us, Ukrainians, now is a Patriotic War. We know how these wars start – and how they end for the occupiers,” Mr. Zelensky said in a speech last week.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is also trying to use Russia’s collective memory of World War II as a justification for an invasion. He has repeatedly claimed, without any evidence, that Mr. Zelensky’s government is controlled by the Nazis. Russian television portrays the war as a campaign to liberate the Ukrainian people from fascist oppression.

Celebrating Soviet victories in World War II has long been a form of state religion under Putin. Families march with photographs of their veteran ancestors in the parades of the so-called Immortal Regiment.

The history of World War II is, of course, complex both in Ukraine and in Russia. Moscow was an ally of Nazi Germany in the dismemberment of Poland in 1939 in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. While most Russians and Ukrainians fought against the Nazis, Germany could recruit entire divisions made up of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers. In western Ukraine, a powerful nationalist insurgency first sided with the Germans, then fought both the Germans and the Soviets, continuing to attack the Soviet regime until the early 1950s.

Ukrainian reservists were on duty in the center of Kyiv on Sunday.

Photo: Sergei Supinsky/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The language of war is alive today in propaganda on Russian TV screens. Civilians killed in Russian shelling in cities like Kharkiv are instead portrayed as victims of Ukrainian fascists who stage the attacks themselves to make Russia look bad. Mr. Putin has repeatedly denied that his forces are targeting civilians in Ukraine.

Marina, a 50-year-old Russian-born accountant from Kyiv who didn’t want her last name to be used, said she gave up trying to convince her relatives in Russia that residential areas of the Ukrainian capital were under Russian attack.

“I tell them we’re being bombed and they just don’t believe me,” she said at a Kiev train station as she tried to find a train ticket on Monday to take her daughter to Germany. “They keep telling me that the Russians can’t do it and that it has to be Nazis.”

Many in the crowd nearby were refugees from cities that had already been occupied by Russian forces northwest of Kyiv.

“This is even scarier than World War II,” said Sergei Zhuravlev, a construction worker from Vyshgorod who was trying to put his pregnant daughter on a train bound for western Ukraine. “This time it is our brothers, our relatives, who are stabbing us in the back.”

Ukrainian residents were on the run when Russia fired on an evacuation route in the suburbs of Kyiv. The Russian-occupied city of Kherson saw acts of defiance this weekend, including a man standing in a Russian military vehicle and waving a Ukrainian flag. Photo: Markus Schreiber/Associated Press

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at [email protected]