War A difficult reckoning with Ukraine’s wartime history - FT prepares the groundwork to drop the support for ukraine by reminding us that Ukraine actually have Nazis.

Expect many more articles like this slowly start to trickle in, like COVID, the lab-leaks, etc, eventually the "conspiratorial" or undesireable angles are now brought back when a 180 turn is needed.
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Only days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the early hours of February 24 2022, the possibility of a new war on European soil still seemed unthinkable to most people, including Russians and Ukrainians.
A year on, the terrible reality is beyond any doubt. Millions of Ukrainians have fled their country, or been internally displaced, and there is mounting evidence of war crimes against Ukrainian civilians. The tragedy of this human suffering is compounded by the dismal awareness of history repeating itself. In the 20th century alone, Ukrainian territory was invaded not only by Russia, but also Austria, Poland and Germany.​

War needs and breeds simplified narratives of good and bad, right and wrong, villains and heroes. But, as Hannah Arendt wrote in 1961, “Even if we admit that every generation has the right to write its own history, we admit no more than that it has the right to rearrange the facts in accordance with its own perspective; we don’t admit the right to touch the factual matter itself.” To put it another way, if truth is the first casualty of war, memory is often the second.
Two new books explore from different but overlapping viewpoints the legacy of this amnesia and the complex past that gave rise to it. It’s an uncomfortable moment to be doing this, especially in view of Vladimir Putin’s flagrant weaponisation of Ukrainian history to suit his own ends. But as Megan Buskey asks in her moving family memoir Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet, “How could a country know itself unless it knew all the things it had been?”​

As the author’s grandmother told her, ‘One army left Ukraine and another arrived. That’s all that changed’​

Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio in the 1980s, Buskey grew up knowing very little about the country that her immediate family had left before she was born. In her twenties, she began filling the holes in her knowledge through conversations with her grandmother Anna and visits to Ukraine. Her travels took her to Staryava, a small town on Ukraine’s western border where her ancestors had lived for generations. Motivating her quest, Buskey explains, was a desire “to work against the silence . . . placed on our family story, a way to turn the history I was born into something I didn’t so much passively receive as actively make.”​

Until 1914, Staryava was an impoverished rural backwater in Galicia on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire. As ethnic Ukrainian peasants, Buskey’s ancestors’ daily existence was one of unremitting if stable hardship. The outbreak of the first world war and subsequent collapse of the Habsburg monarchy placed sleepy Staryava on the frontline of the violence. For the next four decades, Staryava and Buskey’s family were in the eye of an unending storm.​

Women in traditional dress in a village in Galicia (on Ukraine’s border with Poland) talking about the war in 1914 © Mirrorpix/Getty Images

Under Soviet rule from 1921, they suffered cruelly from collectivisation, in which an estimated 3.3mn Ukrainians died of starvation. When the Nazis invaded Russia in 1941, many Ukrainians initially welcomed them as liberators — an illusion that soon evaporated. Hundreds of thousands were killed by Hitler’s Hunger Plan, the deliberate genocide by starvation of Soviet civilians. As Buskey’s grandmother told her, “One army left and another arrived. That’s all that changed.”​

In 1947, with Ukraine back under Soviet control, her great-grandmother, grandmother and young daughters — one of whom was Buskey’s mother — were among 76,000 people forcibly deported to Siberia, victims of the Soviet campaign to crush Ukrainian nationalism. For the next 20 years, the women worked six days a week in punishing conditions in the coal mines of Yemanzhelinsk.​

Piecing this story together led Buskey to many enriching connections with previously little-known family members in Ukraine — but also to some painful truths. Her grandmother’s first marriage in 1941 to a man nearly twice her age had come when she was 15 (not 18 as Buskey had been told) and already three months pregnant. Was this the result of mutual attraction, coercion or rape? Within a year of the marriage, Anna’s husband was arrested for political activities and imprisoned in Mauthausen, then Auschwitz, where he died. She also discovered that Anna’s second husband, Buskey’s grandfather, was still alive and living in Ukraine. Meeting him for the first time in 2003, it was hard to reconcile the “kindly frail old man” with the violent drunkard of family lore.
A much more disturbing twist concerned Anna’s adored brother Stefan, who disappeared in the 1940s. Buskey’s dogged research in newly opened former Soviet archives revealed that Stefan, like many young Ukrainian men, had been active in the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Partisan Army, violent terrorist groups responsible for the deaths of thousands of Poles and Jews. An early member of the pro-Nazi Ukrainian auxiliary police, Stefan was also involved in the round-ups, deportation and mass murder of the local Jewish population.​

Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet is admirably honest in confronting the horrific intersection of Ukrainian nationalism and the Jewish genocide. It is a dark strand in the country’s history that is described in detail in A Small Town in Ukraine by British historian Bernard Wasserstein, emeritus professor of history at the University of Chicago.​

Wasserstein focuses his attention on Krakovets (Krakowiec in Polish), birthplace of his Jewish grandfather, which lies just 18km north of Staryava. His approach is more scholarly and objective than Buskey’s, tracing the fortunes of the town and its Jewish inhabitants from the 13th century to the present day, and locating both in the context of the region’s complex social and political history. The personal thread of his own family’s experiences lends warmth and tragedy to the facts that he meticulously documents.​

Grindingly poor and deeply religious, Galician Jews in the early 20th century were for the most part universally despised as the dregs of the dregs, tolerated by their Polish and Austrian overlords and resented by the local peasantry. With the outbreak of the first world war, nationalist antagonisms flared and antisemitism intensified on all sides, unleashing utter misery on the Jewish population of Galicia. In the interwar years, many Poles and Ukrainians conveniently identified the Jews with their hated Soviet oppressors. “Don’t consider a Jew a human being or a goat or a cow,” ran one Ukrainian proverb.

Wasserstein’s grandfather Berl fled Galicia during the first world war, along with thousands of other Jews, and settled in Berlin, where he founded a modestly successful manufacturing business. Early one morning in October 1938, having so far weathered the Nazi regime’s anti-Jewish restrictions and persecution, Berl and his 17-year-old son Addi were abruptly arrested along with 7,000 other Polish-born men and deported to the border of a country Berl hadn’t lived in for more than two decades. The Poles meanwhile were doing everything they could to close their borders to Jewish refugees. With few other options, Berl and Addi reluctantly returned to Krakovets, joined soon after by Berl’s wife and daughter.​

We must recognise the Holocaust as an enactment of diverse variants of antisemitism in multiple places, including Ukraine​

Literally on the front line in September 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, Krakovets fell under three different regimes in the space of that one month. By June 1941, when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, Berl and his family had missed the tiny window of opportunity to escape.​

The nightmare that unfolded for the Jews from that point on does not make easy reading. It never does. “Ukrainian militias killed thousands of Jews in pogroms and massacres throughout the region in the early weeks of the German occupation.” By the end of the year, the regional murder toll of Jews in that region of Galicia alone had reached 60,000. By June 1943, when the SS officially reported the job done, 1.5mn Jewish civilians in eastern Ukraine had been killed. As Wasserstein relates, “Nearly all the Jews of Krakovets . . . were among those massacred.”​

Berl, Czarna and 18-year old Lotte managed for a time to evade the round-ups, thanks to a local odd-job man who sheltered them for more than a year in a hut on the edge of town. In April 1944, just three months before the liberation of Krakovets, he betrayed them to the Nazis. They were forced to dig their own graves and then shot. Wasserstein’s father Addi, who had returned to Germany in 1939, eventually succeeded, after attempts to secure visas had been blocked by multiple Allied countries, in making his way to Turkey and from there to Palestine and England.​

As many historians have now argued, most recently Dan Stone in The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, the annihilation of Europe’s Jewry should not be viewed as a purely German phenomenon, carried out predominantly in Nazi concentration and death camps. Rather, we must recognise the Holocaust as an enactment of diverse variants of antisemitism, fuelled and facilitated simultaneously in multiple places, including Ukraine, by a toxic (and intoxicating) surge of nationalist and racist ideologies.​

German transport columns passing through Galicia (later part of Ukraine) c1915 © Paul Thompson/FPG/Getty Images

Putin’s invocation of the history of the Nazis to justify his invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — part of his broader project to redefine his country’s history — sounded utterly absurd to most people in the west. A crude and mendacious act of cynical propaganda, it was designed to mine a deep seam of trauma and patriotism within Russia and on its borders.​

But Wasserstein and Buskey do also highlight instances of history being forgotten and even erased in contemporary Ukraine. Almost no trace remains of the Jewish communities of Krakovets or Staryava, or any of the other towns and villages where they’d lived for centuries. Relics of Ukraine’s Soviet past have also been removed throughout the country. Thousands of streets have been renamed, some 1,400 statues of Lenin have been dismantled, replaced in many places by statues to the Ukrainian freedom fighter Roman Shukhevych. As Wasserstein’s reminds us, Shukhevych was a vicious thug, “a Nazi collaborator, anti-Soviet guerrilla fighter and ethnic cleanser of Poles and Jews.”
Recommended
ReviewFT Books Essay
From February 2022: Ukraine through the lens of history​

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Both of these books succeed in putting a human face to the suffering of ordinary people trapped in the turmoil of physical conflict and political ideologies, and the forces that informed and shaped their often desperately constrained choices and actions. Both also steadfastly refuse to airbrush the past.
Ukraine has been independent of Soviet rule only since 1991. Any hesitant progress towards a full and honest reckoning with its complex history halted abruptly one year ago. “When Russian missiles began to rain down on Ukraine,” as Buskey puts it, “nuance was buried under the rubble and carnage.” At some point, hopefully, nuance will return to Ukraine’s self-narrative. For now, the urgent struggle for survival continues.​

 

[AN/ALR56]

This article was made just after this one:
Archive.

Watching Volodymyr Zelensky fight back tears as he addressed his soldiers in Kyiv’s St. Sophia Square last Friday, it was hard not to think of two of the past year’s most common refrains. The first is that, in his determination to eliminate Ukraine as a national concept, Vladimir Putin has done more than any man in history to consolidate Ukrainian national sentiment. The second is that, in his attempt to prove the decadence of the West, Putin has breathed more life into the Western alliance than it’s had since the end of the Cold War.

It’s true that the West, with the support of official, public, and elite opinion, has formed a united front to uphold the principles of territorial integrity and national sovereignty in Europe. We have done this while making great economic sacrifices of our own, and walking the tightrope of avoiding direct confrontation with Russia even as we help Ukraine build the most formidable land army in Europe. The average voter in America or Europe can therefore be forgiven if he believes that the war has steeled rather than strained the idea of the West, the same way it has fortified rather than broken the idea of a free and independent Ukraine.

But this truism, which is repeated as much in the United States as in Europe, is at least somewhat illusory. In reality, the war has revealed that the West’s position is more contingent and isolated than we’d thought, while the prospects for Ukrainian freedom may rest on a set of promises and expectations that the West is not prepared to fulfill.

Few things capture the brittleness of the Western alliance like the otherwise discrete issue of tanks. For months, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was seen as the sole obstacle to providing Ukraine with two battalions of German-made Leopard 2 battle tanks, which are maintained in arsenals all over Europe. Scholz claimed he simply sought guarantees that a tank package for Ukraine would be seen as a Western rather than a German initiative; his critics, including the author, suspected he was really just seeking to forestall a Ukrainian victory in order to protect German relations with Russia. Scholz finally caved at the end of January under pressure from NATO allies and his coalition partners in the German government, and after obtaining a commitment from the Biden administration to send its own M1 Abrams tanks.

Only a few weeks later, however, the tank coalition started to come apart. Portugal announced it would send three tanks, Spain six, and Norway eight. But the Netherlands, having pledged 18 tanks, suddenly revised its offer to zero. Ditto Denmark, which will now offer none of its 44 Leopard 2s to Ukraine. Greece, which has more of the tanks than any country but Germany, has also declined to participate. Sweden signaled that it wouldn’t provide any battle tanks to Ukraine until after it becomes a member of NATO, a process that could outlast the war. Finland will supply three Leopard mine-clearing vehicles, but no battle tanks. The effort to put together two small battalions—just 62 Leopard 2 tanks out of a European inventory of 2,000—nearly collapsed, leaving Germany (and Poland) holding the bag.

Some of the damage has since been reversed—Sweden has offered “up to 10” tanks, Spain may add four more later this year, and the Dutch and Danish will now furnish 40-year-old Leopard 1s by year’s end—but only after furious activity from Berlin, which increased its own commitment to complete a battalion of advanced model Leopard 2s. The tank coalition now appears every bit a “German” endeavor—precisely the situation Scholz had said he needed to avoid.

The political consequences of the battle tank fiasco should not be dismissed. A large percentage of German voters already oppose arms deliveries to Ukraine on principle; now, German media and public opinion leaders will find it hard to complain about Scholz’s gut policy of hesitance and reluctance, which Western and Northern Europe have revealed to be justified. The tank episode will likewise weaken the position of Germans in favor of further military aid like fighter jets and long-range missiles—which means those requests may have to find their way through Western, Northern, and Southern Europe without the decisive backing of Berlin. Scholz’s more hawkish coalition partners in the Green and Free Democratic Parties have taken a hit, and forces opposed to NATO and to higher defense spending have been strengthened. America and Europe remain more united in Ukraine than they ever were over Serbia or Iraq, but there are reasons to worry about the future and value of Western solidarity.



The political crosswinds now buffeting German supporters of Ukraine suggest that the burden of arms provisions in 2023 and beyond will likely fall even more heavily on the United States, whose contributions to Ukraine’s war effort already dwarf those of the other top 30 donor countries combined: Between Jan. 24, 2022. and Jan. 22, 2023, the United States committed $47 billion in military aid to Ukraine, compared with $5.8 billion from Britain, $2.6 billion from Poland, $2.5 billion from Germany, and a derisory $700 million from France. (When accounting for all bilateral commitments as a percentage of GDP, including the costs of settling refugees, Poland, the Baltics, and the Czech Republic have contributed the most.)

Watching Volodymyr Zelensky fight back tears as he addressed his soldiers in Kyiv’s St. Sophia Square last Friday, it was hard not to think of two of the past year’s most common refrains. The first is that, in his determination to eliminate Ukraine as a national concept, Vladimir Putin has done more than any man in history to consolidate Ukrainian national sentiment. The second is that, in his attempt to prove the decadence of the West, Putin has breathed more life into the Western alliance than it’s had since the end of the Cold War.

It’s true that the West, with the support of official, public, and elite opinion, has formed a united front to uphold the principles of territorial integrity and national sovereignty in Europe. We have done this while making great economic sacrifices of our own, and walking the tightrope of avoiding direct confrontation with Russia even as we help Ukraine build the most formidable land army in Europe. The average voter in America or Europe can therefore be forgiven if he believes that the war has steeled rather than strained the idea of the West, the same way it has fortified rather than broken the idea of a free and independent Ukraine.

But this truism, which is repeated as much in the United States as in Europe, is at least somewhat illusory. In reality, the war has revealed that the West’s position is more contingent and isolated than we’d thought, while the prospects for Ukrainian freedom may rest on a set of promises and expectations that the West is not prepared to fulfill.

Few things capture the brittleness of the Western alliance like the otherwise discrete issue of tanks. For months, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was seen as the sole obstacle to providing Ukraine with two battalions of German-made Leopard 2 battle tanks, which are maintained in arsenals all over Europe. Scholz claimed he simply sought guarantees that a tank package for Ukraine would be seen as a Western rather than a German initiative; his critics, including the author, suspected he was really just seeking to forestall a Ukrainian victory in order to protect German relations with Russia. Scholz finally caved at the end of January under pressure from NATO allies and his coalition partners in the German government, and after obtaining a commitment from the Biden administration to send its own M1 Abrams tanks.

Only a few weeks later, however, the tank coalition started to come apart. Portugal announced it would send three tanks, Spain six, and Norway eight. But the Netherlands, having pledged 18 tanks, suddenly revised its offer to zero. Ditto Denmark, which will now offer none of its 44 Leopard 2s to Ukraine. Greece, which has more of the tanks than any country but Germany, has also declined to participate. Sweden signaled that it wouldn’t provide any battle tanks to Ukraine until after it becomes a member of NATO, a process that could outlast the war. Finland will supply three Leopard mine-clearing vehicles, but no battle tanks. The effort to put together two small battalions—just 62 Leopard 2 tanks out of a European inventory of 2,000—nearly collapsed, leaving Germany (and Poland) holding the bag.

Some of the damage has since been reversed—Sweden has offered “up to 10” tanks, Spain may add four more later this year, and the Dutch and Danish will now furnish 40-year-old Leopard 1s by year’s end—but only after furious activity from Berlin, which increased its own commitment to complete a battalion of advanced model Leopard 2s. The tank coalition now appears every bit a “German” endeavor—precisely the situation Scholz had said he needed to avoid.

The political consequences of the battle tank fiasco should not be dismissed. A large percentage of German voters already oppose arms deliveries to Ukraine on principle; now, German media and public opinion leaders will find it hard to complain about Scholz’s gut policy of hesitance and reluctance, which Western and Northern Europe have revealed to be justified. The tank episode will likewise weaken the position of Germans in favor of further military aid like fighter jets and long-range missiles—which means those requests may have to find their way through Western, Northern, and Southern Europe without the decisive backing of Berlin. Scholz’s more hawkish coalition partners in the Green and Free Democratic Parties have taken a hit, and forces opposed to NATO and to higher defense spending have been strengthened. America and Europe remain more united in Ukraine than they ever were over Serbia or Iraq, but there are reasons to worry about the future and value of Western solidarity.



The political crosswinds now buffeting German supporters of Ukraine suggest that the burden of arms provisions in 2023 and beyond will likely fall even more heavily on the United States, whose contributions to Ukraine’s war effort already dwarf those of the other top 30 donor countries combined: Between Jan. 24, 2022. and Jan. 22, 2023, the United States committed $47 billion in military aid to Ukraine, compared with $5.8 billion from Britain, $2.6 billion from Poland, $2.5 billion from Germany, and a derisory $700 million from France. (When accounting for all bilateral commitments as a percentage of GDP, including the costs of settling refugees, Poland, the Baltics, and the Czech Republic have contributed the most.)