I got lambasted in a thread today for pointing out, we have bad and worse in this situation. Ukrainians were active and enthusiastic collaborators with the Totenkopf SS and in fact had whole divisions in the SS. They gave up their Jews readily and greeted the Nazi Panzers with wreaths of flowers. Sure Stalin starved them but that does not excuse them of their guilt. I know it was a gazillion years ago, but let’s not coronate the Ukrainian people as gentle Western Europeans being occupied by hardline communists. We have one group of corrupt Russian gangsters fighting corrupt Ukrainian gangsters. I say get the popcorn and let’s watch them slug it out.
What about the Ukrainians who signed up with Stalin and murdered indiscrimately, and not only Jews?
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin starved millions of Ukrainian peasants into submission because they'd refused to work on collective farms. In 1932 and '33, Ukrainian villages and cities were filled up with the corpses of men, women and children.
Any country that removed the Soviets from power in the Ukraine was considered a liberator, including Hitler. That said, the vast majority of Ukrainians fought against the Nazis.
During the occupation, the Nazis obliterated tens of thousands of villages; starved the residents of Ukraine's capital, Kiev; and deported more than 2 million civilians - mostly women and children - to work as forced laborers in Germany and Austria.
Stalin's starvation genocide in Ukraine estimated at 7.3m dead is a historical fact. However, what is lesser known that the victims were mostly located in breadbasket region of Central and Eastern Ukraine, that means the majority of the victims were ethnic Russians, not ethnic Ukrainians.
This is not to say that ethnic Ukrainians did not die in Holodomor. They did, but they did not constitute 7.3m.
Nationalist ethnic Ukraininans played this card for too long. Sooner or later it will backfire on them.