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.
Out in this wasteland rested a haunting reminder of long-ago battles on this same swath of southern Ukraine: a swastika, chipped into a rock, had emerged from the receding water. The year “1942’’ was written next to it.
“History is repeating itself,” Mr. Shkalikov, a tank driver on leave from the Ukrainian army, said of the World War II-era carving. He noted the timing: The Swastika had become visible because of more recent act of war, the explosion at the Kakhovka dam in June that drained a reservoir the size of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
“We are fighting this war on the same landscape and with the same weapons” as those used in World War II, he said, evoking the heavy artillery and tanks that still shape the course of a land war.
World War II has been an ideological battlefield in today’s war in Ukraine, with Russia falsely calling Kyiv’s government neofascist and citing that as the rationale for its invasion. The country’s military history is cropping up on the actual battlefield as well, not just with artifacts in the soil but in the lessons Ukraine has learned from a war fought long ago.
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.
Ukraine is now echoing that World War II offensive, fighting at sites southeast of Zaporizhzhia in what the Ukrainian military calls the “Melitopol direction.” The strategic goal is the same as it was eight decades ago — to isolate enemy soldiers in the Kherson region and threaten Crimea — but Ukrainian troops are moving far more slowly, having gained only a few miles in more than a month.
“Historical parallels,…
2023-07-18 03:21:35
Post from www.nytimes.com
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