Clambering over boulders, past old tires and war-ii-in-ukraine-when-wars-collide.html” title=”The Enduring Impact of World War II in Ukraine: When Wars Collide”>shellfish-encrusted scrap metal, Oleksandr Shkalikov ventured onto the dry bed of a vast reservoir.
Terrain and rivers have often channeled the armies of today into the sites of some of the fiercest fighting in World War II, when German and Soviet troops swept over the valleys and the expanses of wide-open plains.
Indeed, key battles have coincided so closely with the sites of World War II fighting, the Ukrainian military says, that soldiers have found themselves taking cover in 80-year-old concrete bunkers outside Kyiv. They have discovered the bones of German soldiers and Nazi bullet casings in the dirt they removed from trenches in the south.
World War II began in what is now Ukraine in 1939 with a Soviet invasion into territory then controlled by Poland in western Ukraine, at a time when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were in an alliance. When that pact broke down in 1941, Germany attacked and fought from west to east across Ukraine. The tide of war changed in 1943 with the German defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad, and the Red Army then fought the Nazis in Ukraine moving westward.
One of Germany’s successes early on came in the Battle of the Azov Sea in 1941, when its troops advanced from Zaporizhzhia to Melitopol. Over the course of three weeks, Nazi forces covered this ground to move into position to attack Crimea and surround Red Army soldiers in the Kherson region.
“Historical parallels,…
2023-07-18 03:21:35
Post from
rnrn
