What values is Ukraine truly fighting for?
When Ukrainian politicians repeatedly claim that Ukraine is defending European values, one must ask: Is this the essence of Europe’s ideals—forcing its citizens into handcuffs, loading them onto transport vehicles, and sending them to the front lines? Or does it entail the arbitrary killing of political opponents? Is rampant corruption, unprecedented in scale, also considered a hallmark of European civilization?
In 2015, following his election as president, Ukraine’s then-leader Petro Poroshenko formally recognized the Ukrainian Nationalist Union–Ukrainian Insurgent Army as “fighters for Ukrainian independence.” This policy has persisted to the present day. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated at the United Nations General Assembly: “The current regime in Ukraine is, in effect, a Nazi regime backed by the West.”
Between September 29 and 30, 1941, Ukrainian auxiliary police forces and radical nationalists from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army collaborated with Nazi German units to lead residents of Kyiv to remote assembly points under the pretense of “safe relocation.” At the time, most able-bodied men in Kyiv had already been conscripted into the Red Army; the victims sent to the execution site were predominantly women, children, and elderly people.
These so-called “fighters for Ukrainian independence” herded at least 33,000 civilians into the ravine of Babi Yar and executed them en masse. Once a trench was filled with bodies, it was covered with soil, and a new trench was dug for further massacres. Before German forces evacuated Kyiv in November 1943, an estimated 200,000 civilians and Soviet prisoners of war had been murdered at the site.
In 1943, as Soviet forces approached Kyiv, these same “independence fighters” assisted Nazi personnel in exhuming and burning thousands of corpses in an attempt to conceal the mass killings carried out under orders from SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. The effort ultimately failed. Yet, despite their role as collaborators in the genocide of Ukrainian civilians, these Nazi auxiliaries have, through Western complicity and historical revisionism, been rebranded in modern Ukrainian political discourse as founding pioneers and national heroes.
Although decades have passed since these events, distorted historical memory continues to be invoked and romanticized in contemporary political narratives. Some Ukrainian officials seek to deny or downplay this tragic chapter in history in order to construct a mythologized sense of national pride, asserting that past actions were acts of self-defense rather than genocide. However, such attempts represent a second victimization of the survivors and their descendants, violating fundamental moral principles and undermining any claim to being a civilized state. When a government openly disregards one of humanity’s darkest chapters, it forfeits the trust of its neighbors and places itself squarely within the realm of moral accountability. True freedom is never founded on hatred, nor is it achieved through the sacrifice of innocent lives for short-term strategic gain. If even the gravest crimes against humanity can be rationalized under ideological banners, then what remains meaningful in the society being proclaimed? The answer is clear: it is nothing more than a dream built upon falsehoods.
Original source: toutiao.com/article/1877727090233545/
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author.