From Berlin to Maidan

directed: Ekaterina Kitaytseva RU 2023 55m

80 years on - is Nazism gaining notoriety in Ukraine?

In 1945 the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany and put an end to the Nazis atrocities at the cost of 27 million lives of the Soviet people. Now 80 years later, the same nationalist ideas the Soviet people had been fighting against is starting to spread across Ukraine.

History books in Ukraine are being rewritten, with nationalist leaders Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevich being made new role models, while the monuments of WWII heroes are being demolished as in the case of General Nikolay Vatutin. The First Ukrainian Front liberated Kiev in November 1943 under his command. Tragically, the General was fatally wounded in the crossfire with the Ukrainian nationalists and he eventually died at the hospital. The monument erected in his honor in 1948, was taken down by the nationalists descendants.

As scholars flip through the history of Nazism during WWII, they find more and more resemblance to what is currently happening in Ukraine. For instance, the Munich Pact of 1938 signed by Germany, Italy, Great Britain, and France required Czechoslovakia to surrender its border regions and defenses (the so-called Sudetenland) to Nazi Germany. By signing this, European countries tried to protect themselves from the imminent German expansion. Almost the same thing happened in 2014 with the Minsk Agreements signed by Russia, Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), with France and Germany at the helm, as they sought to end the civil war in Donbass but the agreements were never fully implemented and the hostilities never stopped.

Watch the documentary to find out if the Nazism is really making a comeback in Ukraine and will history repeat itself?