‘Soviets
invading Germany, Ukraine:’ Berlin faces tough choice on PM
Yatsenyuk’s WW2 take
Ukraine's Prime Minister Arseny
Yatsenyuk.(Reuters / Valentyn Ogirenko)
Standard North American and Western European history textbooks give students the impression that WW2 in Europe was a fight between Germany, the USSR, France and the UK, with the US getting involved later. The other countries where the war was fought are, largely, regarded as victims of Germany. This is simplistic. In reality, Germany wasn’t alone in its invasion of the USSR in 1941. Forces from Romania, Finland, Italy, Hungary and Slovakia also took part and West Ukrainian elements collaborated with Hitler’s war machine.
Bryan
MacDonald
RT,
10
January, 2015
This
week, Ukraine Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said the USSR had
invaded Germany and Ukraine in WW2. Despite attempts by the Western
press to bury the story, Russia is now demanding answers from Berlin.
Nothing
is louder than silence. I know this, you know this and you can be
sure that Angela Merkel knows it too. Why then is the Chancellor’s
government refusing to comment on Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s extraordinary
remarks? The reasons are complex, as I will shortly outline. First,
though, here’s what Yatsenyuk actually said.
"All
of us still clearly remember the Soviet invasion of Ukraine and
Germany," he
told German-state broadcaster ARD. "We
need to avoid [a repeat of] it."
"Nobody
has the right to rewrite the results of the Second World War," he
also added. "Russia's
President Putin is trying to do exactly this."
When
I saw the comments on my Twitter timeline, I was initially convinced
it was a joke. So much disinformation is circulated on the platform
that I automatically dismissed it as a misquote. Surely a senior
politician wouldn’t say something like that? Only 24 hours later,
when I saw Yatsenyuk’s words still swooshing through the
Twitter-sphere, did I realize that he actually did utter those words.
Arseniy
Yatsenyuk, apparently handpicked for the PM post by US
diplomat Victoria
Nuland,
believes the USSR invaded Germany in WW2. This runs contrary to the
almost universally accepted narrative that Germany actually attacked
the Soviets first in Operation Barbarossa. After repelling the
attack, USSR forces eventually made it to Berlin where they met the
other liberating powers, the USA and Britain.
Naturally,
some are claiming that Yatsenyuk made a slip of the tongue. This is
hogwash. The only thing that dropped was his mask. I’ve heard
similar remarks before and the location was Western Ukraine, where
the PM is from. Yatsenyuk hails from Chernivsti, widely regarded as
the region’s second cultural capital, after Lvov, which is viewed
by many as the nationalist stronghold.
Something
interesting used to happen each May 9 in Ukraine (the anniversary of
the German surrender in 1945). Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, Donetsk,
Dnipropetrovsk and all the other major cities, bar one, honored the
defeat of the Nazis. Many in Lvov have never looked too happy with
the day. In fact, in 2011, local ‘patriots’ went a step further
by attacking a small gathering of veterans who were commemorating
the occasion.
The
reason for this feeling is simple. West Ukrainians believe that they
lost the war. Their side was defeated. Put simply, Yatsenyuk is
merely a product of his environment. However, this time he expressed
publicly a view that was probably previously restricted to private
discourse. It's possible that he felt a German audience might have
been sympathetic to his position. If so, that was a huge misread of
the German people.
Standard North American and Western European history textbooks give students the impression that WW2 in Europe was a fight between Germany, the USSR, France and the UK, with the US getting involved later. The other countries where the war was fought are, largely, regarded as victims of Germany. This is simplistic. In reality, Germany wasn’t alone in its invasion of the USSR in 1941. Forces from Romania, Finland, Italy, Hungary and Slovakia also took part and West Ukrainian elements collaborated with Hitler’s war machine.
The
difference between Ukraine and, for example, Slovakia is that Slovaks
have come to understand that their wartime behavior was wrong. The
pro-Nazi leader, Jozef Tiso, is rightly reviled among the vast
majority in Kosice and Bratislava. However, in West Ukraine, their
chief Hitler acolyte Stepan Bandera is accorded ‘hero’ status.
Indeed, there’s a gigantic statue of him in front of the main
railway station in Lvov.
Ukrainian
reverence for relics of the Nazi past is both embarrassing and
worrying for Germany. I’m sure Merkel often wishes that her NATO
allies had found a more reasonable client state to antagonize Russia
with. Ukraine’s refusal to deal with its past head-on is a
festering boil for EU diplomats.
Just
this week, the Czech President, Milos Zeman, was embroiled in an
argument with Bandera fan boys in Ukrainian academia.
“You
are aware of the Bandera statement: ‘You must kill every Polish
person between 16 and 60 years of age?’ If you say you don’t know
this - then what kind of scholars of Ukrainian studies are you?” he
wrote.
Zeman
continued: “I
want to tell you that Bandera wished to make out of Ukraine a vassal
state of Germany… I can’t congratulate a country that has such
‘national heroes.’”
This
also explains the silence of German media on Yatsenyuk’s words. If
the German public were made fully aware of what the visitor from Kiev
had said, they would be outraged. So much so that Merkel could be
forced to withdraw all support for Ukraine.
If
Yatensyuk’s comments were widely circulated, they would embolden
revisionists in Germany and beyond - something there is, sadly, no
shortage of.
Just
as it seemed the story would fade away, the Russian Foreign Ministry
made a late intervention, asking Berlin to outline its official
position on Yatsenyuk’s verbiage. The reply, assuming it ever
arrives, will be telling.
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