For decades, Ukrainians and Russians celebrated their combined experience of World War II, dying together under German fire, and together driving the Nazis off their lands and victorious over them in 1945.
On May 9 each year, they celebrated Victory Day together, marched together and laid flowers together at monuments. But this year, the situation is different. While Russian President Vladimir Putin used these festivities to justify his invasion, Ukrainians hid in bomb shelters, fought in trenches and died in air raids, as their grandparents did for many years.
The eastern Donbass region, which the Kremlin is trying to capture in this war, has traditionally viewed Moscow as a center of political and cultural gravity, and many residents have close family ties with Russia. But the war complicated this relationship, according to the newspaper.The New York Times“.
In 2014, after Putin annexed Crimea from Ukraine and instigated a separatist war in Donbass, the government in Kyiv removed the Soviet symbols of D-Day.
As she does every year on May 9, Monday, Nina Mikhailovna came to the city park to commemorate the Allied victory in World War II. She came to memorialize her father, who was murdered in 1943, and to remember those who died to liberate her native Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine from the Nazis.
Nina Mikhailovna, 89, thought she would never see anything as tragic as that years-long war with the Germans. But she said the current war with the Russians is worse.
“At least the Germans were enemies. But these are our people,” she added. Citing the intertwined history and family ties between Russia and Ukraine.
“My niece lives in Moscow but was born in Sloviansk. Now they are sending her husband to fight. What is he supposed to do, kill his mother-in-law?” “It’s hard to bear,” she said.
On Monday morning in Kramatorsk, sirens sounded and the sound of bombs and missiles rocked the city as Russian forces approached from the north and east. They are not moving as fast as Putin would like, but they are now close enough to the city, which is a major industrial center in the Donetsk region.
And Andrei, who was wounded in a Russian raid, said: “It was clear that this would happen on the 9th of May. We were ready for it.”
A first sergeant named Alexander added, “We are no longer brothers. Of course it is painful. What did my grandfather fight for?”
For Maria Mvodivna, 93, a resident of Parvenkov who also remembers the arrival of the Nazis in World War II, all she cares now is that the shooting stops.
“I just want the war to end,” said Mvodivna, standing anxiously in her living room. “I have so little time left to live…”.