American journalist Edgar Snow wrote back in January 1945 that Ukraine had “paid the bill” for the war. Today, this conversation is especially important for the Israeli audience: the price of Victory included not only Ukrainian fronts and destroyed cities but also the fates of many peoples who then inhabited Ukraine, including the Jews of Ukraine — victims of the Holocaust, soldiers, doctors, refugees, evacuees, and families whose memory was dissolved in Soviet statistics for decades.
The Price of War: How Ukraine Paid for Victory in World War II
Ukraine in World War II became a battlefield and a symbol of enormous sacrifices, the scale of which was long hushed up. Western journalists noted as early as 1945: the bill for the defeat of Nazism was paid primarily by the Ukrainian people.
This topic is important for the Israeli audience as well. Because Ukraine was not only a territory of the front, occupation, destroyed cities, and burned villages. It was home to many peoples — Ukrainians, Jews, Poles, Russians, Crimean Tatars, Roma, Belarusians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Romanians, and other communities.
The price of Victory included the fates of all these people.
But modern Russia tries to present the multinational Victory as almost exclusively “Russian.” Thus, foreign blood, foreign destroyed cities, foreign graves, and foreign memory are turned into tools of imperial propaganda.
This article does not claim to be a complete analysis of all the forces that operated on the territory of modern Ukraine during World War II. Here were the Red Army, Soviet partisans, German occupation administration, Wehrmacht and SS structures, Ukrainian nationalist underground, OUN and UPA, local auxiliary police, collaborationist formations, Polish underground, Jewish resistance, ghettos, partisan groups, underground fighters, rescuers of Jews, Soviet repressive organs, and post-war anti-Soviet resistance.
This complex history requires a separate conversation because it included both the fight against Nazism and the fight against Stalin’s USSR, collaboration, saving people, and crimes against the civilian population.
What is important here is this: Ukraine became one of the main territories where a huge price was paid for Victory, and modern Russia tries to appropriate this Victory along with foreign grief and foreign memory.
Voice from the West: Edgar Snow and the Ukrainian War Bill
In January 1945, American journalist Edgar Snow, returning from the USSR, published an article in The Saturday Evening Post titled “The Ukraine Pays the Bill.” It was not a book but a magazine report, published on January 27, 1945.
Snow was one of the first in the West to loudly voice the scale of Ukrainian losses: at least 10 million lives — soldiers and civilians, as well as material damage of 30–40 billion dollars.
These data were reported to him by Ukrainian officials, such as the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR for Agriculture Vasily Starchenko and the head of the State Planning Committee of the republic Vladimir Valuyev. They knew the real situation in the liberated territory and understood the scale of the destruction.
Snow noted an important difference: the territory of the RSFSR experienced German occupation only partially, whereas a significant part of Ukraine went through the front, occupation, looting, destruction, mass deaths, and demographic collapse. Soviet statistics, however, downplayed the tragedy.
In 1946, the magazine “Bolshevik” named the total losses of the USSR at 7 million people, concealing the disproportionate contribution of Ukraine. Even earlier, in May 1945, Joseph Stalin raised a toast to the “Russian people” as the “leading force” of the Soviet Union. Thus, the foundation of the myth that Snow effectively refuted was laid: the titanic struggle was not only “Russian glory” but to a large extent a Ukrainian war.
This does not mean that other peoples did not fight and die. They did. But the Ukrainian price of Victory was too high to be dissolved in someone else’s political formula.
Stalin’s Seizure of Western Ukraine and the Broken Map Before the War
An important context begins even before Germany’s attack on the USSR.
In 1939, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the joint division of Poland by Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR, the Soviet Union occupied the eastern territories of Poland, including Western Ukraine. Soviet propaganda called this “reunification,” but in essence, it was a Stalinist seizure and annexation of territories caught between two totalitarian regimes.
This sharply changed the map of Ukraine before the big war.
New lands, new cities, new communities, and new fates became part of the Ukrainian SSR. Together with Western Ukraine, Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, and other population groups who had previously lived in a different political system entered Soviet reality.
For people, this meant not only a change of flag. Sovietization came: arrests, deportations, nationalization of property, destruction of political and social structures, pressure on religious and cultural life. Part of the population experienced first Stalinist rule, then Nazi occupation, and then Soviet control again.
That is why, when we talk about the price of Ukraine in World War II, we cannot start only from 1941. For Western Ukraine, the catastrophe began earlier — with the division of Eastern Europe between Stalin and Hitler.
This is especially important for understanding Jewish statistics. Before the war, about 1.5 million Jews lived in Soviet Ukraine. After the inclusion of Western Ukrainian territories, Bukovina, and Bessarabia, the number of Jews in the expanded borders of Ukraine increased to about 2.4 million. That is, Stalin’s expansion of borders directly changed the demographic picture, which then came under the blow of the Nazi invasion.
The Scale of the Ukrainian Tragedy
Snow’s estimate of 10 million dead is close to modern Ukrainian memorial estimates: Ukraine’s losses in World War II are often called in the range of 8–10 million people. These losses include victims of battles, occupation, famine, repression, deportations, forced labor, diseases, the Holocaust, and the general destruction of life.
More cautious Western reference estimates may call 5–7 million dead. The difference is related to the methodology: whom exactly to count, in what borders, whether to consider natives of Ukraine who died outside the republic, prisoners of war, civilians, those who died from hunger and diseases, deported, victims of occupation and repression.
But the essence does not change: Ukraine was one of the main territories of human and material catastrophe of World War II.
If we take the estimate of 8–10 million dead and compare it with the modern estimate of the total losses of the USSR of about 26.6 million people, then Ukraine accounts for about 30–38% of this enormous tragedy.
This is not a secondary share.
This is almost a third or more of the entire Soviet price of the war.
The demographic blow was colossal — up to 14 million people. Estimates often indicate that the population of Ukraine decreased from about 41 million in 1941 to about 27 million by 1945. This is not only the dead. This also includes evacuees, mobilized, abducted, displaced, refugees, people who found themselves outside their former lives.
Material damage of 30–40 billion dollars by then calculations is not an abstract sum. These are destroyed cities, villages, factories, hospitals, schools, mines, bridges, railways, houses, farms, and entire regions.
Ukraine lost about 700 cities and towns, 28 thousand villages, a huge part of industry and agriculture. The Nazis plundered the country, exporting grain, equipment, livestock, raw materials, people, and even land.
And then came the famine of 1946–1947. Formally, the war was over, but for many families, death, poverty, and destruction continued even after Victory.
The economic losses of Ukraine amounted to about 42% of the damage inflicted on the entire USSR.
About 10 million people were left homeless or lived in destroyed premises.
Destroyed or seriously damaged were:
— about 18 thousand medical institutions;
— about 33 thousand educational institutions;
— about 16 thousand industrial enterprises.
Behind each such figure is not only state statistics. There are families, cities, villages, jobs, schools, hospitals, documents, cemeteries, memory, and life that had to be rebuilt anew.
Ukrainians and Other Peoples: Who Paid This Bill
The main “mistake” of Russian propaganda is turning the multinational price of war into a “Russian Victory.”
Ukraine in World War II was home to many peoples. Ukrainians, Jews, Poles, Russians, Crimean Tatars, Roma, Belarusians, Moldovans, Greeks, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Romanians, German colonists, and other communities lived on this land.
Each group experienced the war in its own way. But they all found themselves inside a huge catastrophe.
Ukrainians formed the basis of the population of the Ukrainian SSR and suffered huge losses at the front and in the rear. Millions of Ukrainians served in the Red Army, died in battles, were captured, returned disabled, lost families and homes.
The civilian population suffered from occupation, punitive operations, burned villages, forced labor, hunger, diseases, deportations, and repressions.
This was not only a military history. It was a history of the destruction of society.
When after the war the Soviet authorities spoke only of the “Soviet people,” Ukrainian specifics disappeared. And when modern Russia speaks of a “Russian Victory,” it makes an even cruder substitution: it takes for itself foreign blood, foreign cities, foreign graves, and foreign grief.
Jews of Ukraine: A Separate Tragedy Within the General Price of War
For the Israeli audience, it is important to highlight this part separately, but not to turn the entire history of Ukraine into only a Jewish theme. The Jewish tragedy is part of the large Ukrainian catastrophe, not a replacement for the entire topic.
The Jews of Ukraine were part of the population of the country through which the war passed. They lived in Kyiv, Odessa, Lviv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Chernivtsi, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Berdychiv, Uman, Medzhybizh, Kamianets-Podilskyi, Rivne, Lutsk, and many other cities and towns.
Before the war, this was a huge map of Jewish life in Eastern Europe: families, synagogues, schools, cemeteries, crafts, trade, Yiddish, Hebrew, Hasidic tradition, Zionist ideas, secular culture.
After the German invasion, Jews became the target of the Holocaust — a separate Nazi policy of extermination.
But it is important to write accurately: the Jews of Ukraine were not only victims of mass shootings. They also fought in the Red Army, served as doctors, engineers, signalmen, worked in the rear, went into evacuation, ended up in ghettos, experienced hunger, diseases, forced labor, deportations, Soviet repressions, and the destruction of life, like other residents of Ukraine.
At the same time, precisely as Jews, they were under the threat of complete extermination.
Ukraine became one of the main territories of the “Holocaust by bullets.” Jews were often killed near their homes — in ravines, forests, fields, quarries, near anti-tank ditches, on the outskirts of cities and towns.
Babi Yar became the most famous symbol of this tragedy. On September 29–30, 1941, 33,771 Jews were shot in Kyiv. But Babi Yar was not the only place. There were hundreds of places of mass extermination on Ukrainian soil.
According to modern estimates, about 1.5 million Jews of Ukraine and Jews who found themselves on Ukrainian territory during the war died as a result of the Holocaust and Nazi occupation policy — from mass shootings, ghetto conditions, hunger, diseases, forced labor, deportations, and the entire system of Nazi extermination.
This figure is important, but it cannot be understood narrowly. The Jewish price of war included not only killings in ravines. It included the front, the rear, evacuation, hunger, diseases, forced labor, loss of families, destruction of communities, and subsequent Soviet erasure of memory.
If we compare approximately 1.5 million Jewish victims with the overall Ukrainian estimate of 8–10 million dead, this is about 15–19% of the Ukrainian price of war. At the same time, Jews made up about 5–6% of the population of Ukraine in expanded borders.
This shows the disproportion of the Jewish tragedy within the overall Ukrainian catastrophe. But this does not cancel the general theme of the article: Ukraine as a country and space of many peoples paid a huge price for Victory.
Soviet Memory: Ukrainians Dissolved, Jews Depersonalized
After the war, the Soviet authorities created a convenient formula: “the Soviet people won.”
There was a part of the truth in it. The victory was indeed common. People of different nationalities fought and died. But this formula often erased specifics.
The Ukrainian sacrifice was dissolved in the general Soviet statistics.
The Jewish sacrifice was dissolved in the words “Soviet citizens.”
This is especially noticeable at places of mass killings. Where the Nazis exterminated Jews precisely as Jews, Soviet memorial texts often simply wrote about citizens, residents, or peaceful people.
Formally, these people were indeed citizens. But the reason for their extermination — Jewish origin — disappeared.
Thus, memory became convenient for the state but incomplete for people.
Ukrainians were deprived of a separate conversation about the price of Ukraine.
Jews were deprived of the exact name of their tragedy.
And then modern Russia turned this Soviet construction into an even more rigid substitution: “Soviet Victory” became “Russian Victory.”
Truth Against Propaganda
Edgar Snow challenged the Soviet myth of the “united people,” but his words were hushed up. Millions of Ukrainians fought in the Red Army on key fronts, died at the front, in captivity, in occupation, and in the rear, yet their contribution was often downplayed or dissolved in the general Soviet formula.
Only after the collapse of the USSR did historians begin to more widely restore the truth: Ukraine paid for Victory with an exorbitant price, becoming a victim of two regimes — Nazi and Stalinist.
Snow’s words that Ukraine “paid the bill” remain relevant today. They remind us of the price of freedom and how easily imperial propaganda appropriates foreign sacrifices.
Modern Russia exploits the memory of World War II as a political resource. It talks about 26.6–27 million dead citizens of the USSR but often presents this tragedy as if it were almost exclusively a Russian sacrifice and Russian feat.
This is a historical lie.
Soviet losses were multinational. Among these millions were Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians, Russians, Kazakhs, Armenians, Georgians, Crimean Tatars, peoples of the Baltics, Caucasus, Central Asia, and others.
Ukraine gave a huge part of this price. The Jews of Ukraine experienced a separate tragedy of the Holocaust. Western Ukraine before the war went through Stalin’s seizure, Sovietization, repressions, and then Nazi occupation.
But Russian propaganda pretends that this entire history belongs to Moscow.
It appropriates veterans of different peoples.
Appropriates Ukrainian cities and villages.
Appropriates the destroyed economy of Ukraine.
Appropriates Babi Yar.
Appropriates the memory of Jews, whom the Soviet system often called nameless “peaceful citizens.”
Appropriates the very right to speak on behalf of Victory.
It sounds especially cynical today when Russia, under the guise of fighting Nazism, is waging war against Ukraine — a country that itself paid a huge price for the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Why This Is Important for Israel
For Israel, this topic is not a distant history.
Many Israeli families have roots in Ukrainian cities and towns. For them, Ukraine is not only a modern country that is once again experiencing war today. It is also a map of family memory: Kyiv, Odessa, Lviv, Chernivtsi, Berdychiv, Uman, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Medzhybizh.
NAnews — Israel News | Nikk.Agency considers this topic as a matter of honest memory. You cannot talk about the price of Victory and forget Ukraine. You cannot talk about World War II and turn a multinational tragedy into a “Russian Victory.” You cannot talk about the Holocaust on Ukrainian soil and again hide Jews behind the impersonal formula “peaceful citizens.”
The victory was common.
But the bill was not the same.
Ukraine paid with millions of lives, destroyed cities, annihilated villages, hunger, occupation, forced labor, repressions, and broken demography.
Among the many peoples who then inhabited Ukraine, Jews paid a special price: as part of the population of a country that went through the war, and as a people against whom the Nazis waged a policy of complete extermination.
That is why the modern Russian attempt to appropriate Victory is not just a dispute about the past. It is an attempt to take away from other peoples their dead, their pain, and their right to speak in their own name.
Because when Russia appropriates Victory, it appropriates not only military glory. It appropriates Ukrainian ruins, Jewish graves, the fates of the deported, shot, those who died of hunger, and those whose names were hidden for decades behind the words “Soviet citizens.”
Victory cannot be privatized.
Grief cannot be appropriated.
Memory cannot be given to those who use the dead to justify a new war.
Sources and reference points
- Edgar Snow, “The Ukraine Pays the Bill”, The Saturday Evening Post, January 27, 1945.
- Ukrainian Institute of National Memory — assessments of Ukraine’s losses in World War II.
- Britannica — reference data on the destruction and losses of Ukraine in World War II.
- Yad Vashem — materials on the Jewish population of Ukraine, the Holocaust, and Babi Yar.
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and National WWII Museum — materials on the Holocaust in Ukraine and the ‘Holocaust by bullets’.