CLAMBERING over boulders, past old tyres and shellfish-encrusted scrap metal, Oleksandr Shkalikov ventured onto the dry bed of a vast reservoir.
Out in this wasteland rested a haunting reminder of long-ago battles on this same swath of southern Ukraine: a swastika, chipped into a rock, had emerged from the receding water. The year “1942’’ was written next to it.
“History is repeating itself,” Shkalikov, a tank driver on leave from the Ukrainian army, said of the World War II-era carving. He noted the timing: the swastika had become visible because of more recent act of war, the explosion at the Kakhovka dam in June that drained a reservoir the size of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
“We are fighting this war on the same landscape and with the same weapons” as those used in World War II, he said, evoking the heavy artillery and tanks that still shape the course of a land war.
World War II has been an ideological battlefield in today’s war in Ukraine, with Russia falsely calling Ukraine’s government neofascist and citing that as the rationale for its invasion.
The country’s military history is cropping up on the actual battlefield as well, not just with artifacts in the soil but in the lessons Ukraine has learned from a war fought long ago.
Terrain and rivers have often channelled the armies of today into the sites of some of the fiercest fighting in World War II, when German and Soviet troops swept over the valleys and the expanses of wide-open plains.
Indeed, key battles have coincided so closely with the sites of World War II fighting, the Ukrainian military says, that soldiers have found themselves taking cover in 80-year-old concrete bunkers outside Kyiv. They have discovered the bones of German soldiers and Nazi bullet casings in the dirt they removed from trenches in the south.
World War II began in what is now Ukraine in 1939 with a Soviet invasion into territory then controlled by Poland in western Ukraine, at a time when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were in an alliance.
When that pact broke down in 1941, Germany attacked and fought from west to east across Ukraine. The tide of war changed in 1943 with the German defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad, and the Red Army then fought the Nazis in Ukraine moving westward.
One of Germany’s successes early on came in the Battle of the Azov Sea in 1941, when its troops advanced from Zaporizhzhia to Melitopol. Over the course of three weeks, Nazi forces covered this ground to move into position to attack Crimea and surround Red Army soldiers in the Kherson region.
Ukraine is echoing that World War II offensive, fighting at sites southeast of Zaporizhzhia in what the Ukrainian military calls the “Melitopol direction.” The strategic goal is the same as it was eight decades ago – to isolate enemy soldiers in the Kherson region and threaten Crimea – but Ukrainian troops are moving far more slowly, having gained only a few miles in more than a month.
“Historical parallels, unfortunately or happily, keep coming to the surface,” said Vasily Pavlov, an adviser to Ukraine’s general headquarters who has closely studied the similarities of the two wars.
Ukrainian demining officers searching for World War II-era mines, grenades and other ordinance in the Dnipro River. — ©️2023 The New York Times Company
Strategically, he said, Ukraine’s generals most directly drew on World War II history in devising a defence of the capital, Kyiv, last year.
In the opening days of the war, the Russian army advanced from Belarus toward the flood plain of the Irpin River – only to find that the Ukrainians had blown up a dam and inundated a vast area of fields, blocking the advance. It was a reprisal of a Soviet trick in 1941, when Moscow blew up an Irpin River dam to block a German tank assault, Pavlov said.
German troops eventually captured Kyiv in 1941; the Russians fought for a month in the suburbs in spring 2022 and withdrew.
When the current war turned from Kyiv to the east, it similarly retraced the battles of World War II.
Then, as today, the looping course of the Siversky Donets River became a front line – with its high banks and swampy shores serving as natural barriers as rival armies fought over the cities and towns alongside them.
In World War II, the river formed a portion of the so-called Mius Line, a defensive position the Nazis built to slow Soviet counterattacks after the Battle of Stalingrad.
In the current war, various cities and villages along the Siversky Donets have come into play. Ukrainian forces used the river’s high bluffs and flood plains, for example, to attempt a defence of the city of Lysychansk, ultimately unsuccessful, and to prevent a Russian crossing near the town of Bilohorivka.
Both wars left riverside towns and villages in ruins. The current fighting has also damaged with shrapnel pocks monuments erected to commemorate the World War II fighting.
The village of Staryi Saltiv in the Kharkiv region was touched by both wars, and was largely destroyed each time.
With neither Russia nor Ukraine able to gain air superiority, the current fighting has hinged mostly on artillery and tanks, as the fighting did in World War II. Other than the addition of drones and sophisticated anti-tank missiles, the armies are fighting with similar weaponry.
Shkalikov, the tank driver, whose home is a short walk from the shore, fought in the opening days of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in fields to the southeast of the city.
After his tank hit a mine, he was given leave from his unit, returned home and began exploring the dry lake bed. Finding the swastika emerging from the water, he said, “didn’t surprise me at all.”
The wars are separated by decades, but “the landscape hasn’t changed,” he said. — ©️2023 The New York Times Company
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