In 1945, American war correspondent Edgar Snow visited Ukraine and wrote:
“It was not until I went on a sobering journey into this twilight of war that I fully realized the price which 40,000,000 Ukrainians paid for Soviet and Allied Victory. The whole titanic struggle… was first of all a Ukrainian war. No fewer than 10,000,000 people had been lost to… Ukraine since 1941…” A relatively small part of [Russia] was actually invaded, but… Ukraine… was devastated.”
Great American writer John Steinbeck also visited Ukraine after WW2 in 1947 and his observation were very similar to those of Edgar Show:
“Although Kiev is greatly destroyed while Moscow is not, the people in Kiev did not seem to have the dead weariness of the Moscow people. They did not slouch when they walked, their shoulders were back, and they laughed in the streets…
Much of the destruction that has been brought on this people is because their land is rich and productive and many conquerors have coveted it… If the United States were completely destroyed from New York to Kansas, we would have about the area of destruction the Ukraine has. If six million people were killed, not counting soldiers, fifteen per cent of the population, you would have an idea of the casualties of the Ukraine. Counting soldiers, there would be many more, but six million out of forty-five million civilians have been killed. There are mines which will never be opened because the Germans threw thousands of bodies down into the shafts. Every piece of machinery in the Ukraine has been destroyed or removed, so that now, until more can be made, everything must be done by hand. Every stone and brick of the ruined city must be lifted and carried with the hands, for there are no bulldozers. And while they are rebuilding, the Ukrainians must produce food, for theirs is the great granary of the nation…”
Yale Prof. Timothy Snyder:
“More Ukrainians died on the Allied side than French. More Ukrainians fought and died on the Allied side than British. More Ukrainians fought and died on the Allied side than Americans. More Ukrainians fought and died on the allied side than French, British, and Americans put together – put together ! Why do we not see this? Because we forget that Ukrainians were fighting in the Red Army. We confuse the Red Army with the Russian Army, which it most definitively was not. The Red Army was the army of the Soviet Union in which Ukrainians because of the geography of the war were substantially over-represented… In absolute numbers, more inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine died in the Second World War than inhabitants of Soviet Russia… Some three and a half million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine – civilians – were victims of German killing policies between 1941 and 1945.”
Kyiv and Ukraine as Seen by John Steinbeck >
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