May 9 is Victory Day, the one day of the year when Ukraine’s impoverished pension-age community takes centre stage and the whole country remembers the immense suffering and heroism of their youth. It should also by rights be a day when the western world gives thanks and remembers the appalling cost to Ukraine of the allied victory over fascism.
After all, this is the land which in The Second World War probably recorded the highest number of casualties, saw the most towns, cities and villages burnt to the ground and witnessed further untold millions shipped off to the Reich as slaves, not to mention the deeply embedded ideological fault lines that the conflict left behind which continue to divide the population. Ukraine was a primary battle ground of the war and even within the apocalyptic context of the Nazi-Soviet struggle, the scale of the devastation was exceptional.
Unfortunately the Cold War created an ideological barrier to acknowledging this reality and for the time being the debt remains outstanding. While the post-war recovery of Western Europe was stimulated by America’s Marshall Plan, Ukraine, along with the rest of the Russian satellites, was forced to do without this well-earned aid. Nor did the Marshall Plan simply pour much-needed capital into the economies of the West European nations in those crucial post-war years of recovery. It also imposed certain conditions and adherence to general standards that paved the way for the integrated European economy which we saw emerging in the 1970s and 1980s in the form of the institutions of the EU. After the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1991 we saw a similar pattern of internationally financed rejuvenation throughout Eastern Europe that was in many ways comparable to a second wave of the Marshall Plan, continuing where the 1940s initiative left off.
In many respects, this European Union-funded reform and modernisation programme that has been the engine of such change throughout the former Socialist nations to have joined the EU since 2004 could be viewed as the natural successor to Marshall. When compared to the rest of its East European neighbours Ukraine has received comparatively very little indeed in terms of big money foreign capital injections, which makes the strides the country has been able to make seem all the more impressive but also poses the question of what could have been achieved here if the West had been more readily prepared to make the same investments into Ukraine’s future.
The legacy of The Second World War is admittedly just one aspect of Ukraine’s complex and multifaceted relationship with the Euro-Atlantic community, but it is one that has received considerably less attention than more prominent features such as the importance of not upsetting the Russians and Victory Day is as good a time as any to reflect on this disparity. Such a re-evaluation would be long overdue; for decades it was considered beyond heretical to identify with any singularly Ukrainian war effort or experience above and beyond the official union-wide party line, but with time the reality of Ukraine’s war is becoming more and more clearly distinguishable from the overall Soviet conflagration. When, then, will the country finally receive the material support from the West that its historic sacrifices would appear to warrant?
