Ukraine emerged from WWII as a “defeated victor,” states Ukrainian historian

Ukraine marked the Day of Remembrance and Victory over Nazism on 8 May 2026. Historian Roman Kabachiy told RBC-Ukraine the country emerged from the war a "defeated victor." Ukraine in WWII bled disproportionately for a victory it never owned.

Some 7.5 million Ukrainians served in the Red Army, Kabachiy noted in an interview with RBC-Ukraine. By his account, half died, and half of the survivors came home wounded. Yale's Timothy Snyder reports the same: more civilians died in Ukraine than in Russia, absolutely and relatively. Yet Moscow still treats the war as private inheritance and a pretext for new conquest. Even its propaganda satellite went dark over occupied Ukraine this spring.

"Ukrainians are defeated victors. On the one hand, we contributed to the victory over Nazism, and on the other hand, we did not gain independence."—Roman Kabachiy while being interviewed by RBC-Ukraine

How Russia inherited the myth, not the weight

Soviet narratives gave Russians the lead role and diminished Ukraine's disproportionate sacrifice. Post-Soviet Russia's version goes further—Russia alone vanquished fascism. Kabachiy disputes both. "If it weren't for the USSR, World War II would not have started," he said.

Kabachiy also cited the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, as well as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union's mutual partition of Poland. Without the US's Lend-Lease and a Western front, Kabachiy argues, the Red Army alone could not have won.

Ukraine in WWII—the crimes the myth concealed

Ukraine sat in Snyder's "bloodlands," the killing zone between Hitler and Stalin. In 1941, Soviet special services blew up Kyiv's Khreshchatyk. The Nazis used the explosion as a pretext to massacre the city's Jews. The Babyn Yar mass shooting that followed killed more than 33,000 in two days.

After the end of World War II, Operations Vistula and West—the 1947 Polish and Soviet deportation campaigns—scattered tens of thousands more. Soviet crimes were never tried at Nuremberg.

"Our main victory is that we survived between two systems."—historian Yaroslav Hrytsak, as cited by Kabachiy

At Yalta in 1945, Churchill pressed Stalin for democratic elections in Poland. The West learned that where the Red Army held ground, it could do nothing.

The same logic still binds Western leaders today. Historian Olena Stiazhkina—driven from her home in Donetsk by Russian-backed proxies in 2014—told NV last summer: "World War I hasn't ended yet." Stiazhkina argues that World War I was meant to close Europe’s imperial age, but for Ukraine, that collapse remained unfinished. The Bolsheviks reconquered Ukraine by 1922.

While Ukraine's independence in 1991 broke Moscow's political dominion, Russia still nursed its imperialist ambitions. In Stiazhkina's reading, today’s war is the continuation of that unresolved collapse.