...a new round of horror was visited on Ukraine following the signing of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Red Army occupied the Polish-ruled wes… - Anna Reid

For the Soviets, and for Putin today, the most important fact about the Ukrainians during the war was not their victimhood but their alleged collaboration with the Nazis..No matter that far more Ukrainians fought in the Red Army than in the Wehrmacht and that Germany was able to recruit tens of thousands of Russian prisoners of war, too.

One of the most oft-quoted records of the siege, scribbled in pencil over the pages of a pocket address book, is that kept by twelve-year-old Tanya Savicheva:
28 December 1941 at 12.30 a.m. – Zhenya died. 25 January 1942 at 3 p.m. – Granny died. 17 March at 5 a.m. – Lyoka died. 13 April at 2 a.m. – Uncle Vasya died. 10 May at 4 p.m. – Uncle Lyosha died. 13 May at 7.30 a.m. – Mama died. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.

Beginning in 1929, Joseph Stalin launched the Holodomor—literally, “killing by hunger”—a program of forced deportations and food and land requisitioning aimed at the permanent emasculation of Ukraine’s rural population as a whole. Rolled out in parallel with a purge of Ukraine’s urban intelligentsia, it resulted in the deaths of nearly four million Ukrainians. Covered up for decades, there is no doubt that this extraordinary mass killing was deliberate: the Soviet authorities knew that villagers were dying in great numbers, yet they persisted in food requisitioning and forbade them from leaving the famine areas for the towns.