Today, on June 22, as we commemorate the 85th sad anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, we once again heard from the russian representative a familiar mix of myths, distortions, and outright lies about the Second World War, the Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the UN, Andriy Melnyk, said during the Security Council meeting.
The irony is striking. It was during the retreat of the Red Army from Kyiv in 1941 that the Dormition Cathedral was blown up on orders from the Soviet leadership in moscow. The blame was then conveniently placed on the Nazi German occupation authorities. This was the official Soviet narrative that generations of us, me including, were taught in the Soviet school.
And today, eighty-five years later, we are once again hearing new falsehoods and new twisted narratives from russia about memory of the Second World War.Today, russia presents itself as the principal victim of Nazi aggression against the USSR. Yet only a tiny portion of russia’s territory, less than 5 percent, experienced brutal occupation by the Third Reich. Ukraine, by contrast, became the main battlefield of the war.
The whole of Ukraine was engulfed by the fighting, fully devastated first by the Nazi invasion and then by the brutal battles that accompanied the liberation of our soil from foreign occupation.
The Ukrainian people paid an immense and horrific price. Up to ten million Ukrainians lost their lives during the Second World War. Ukraine’s land was subjected to devastation on a scale never seen before in history. Every Ukrainian family carries the memory of that tragedy.That is why neither russia nor anyone else has the right to monopolize the memory of the war, to appropriate the suffering of its victims, or to weaponize, as we see today in this Hall, history for political purposes of moscow.
