Not long ago, Ukrainian President Zelenskiy commented on the Red Army's campaign to liberate Kiev from nazi hands across the Dnieper River in 1943. In the view of the Ukrainian president, in the process of countering the German Nazis, the Soviet Union not only made serious mistakes, but also caused a large number of casualties.
According to official Soviet data, the number of Soviet casualties in the Battle of the Dnieper was 417,000, but according to studies and calculations by some historians, the true death toll was at least double, reaching nearly a million.
In particular, in the battle to liberate Kiev, up to 240,000 soldiers and officers were killed. During the battle, many Ukrainians who had previously lived in German-occupied territories were mobilized by the Military Service Committee of the Soviet Field Army, who were regarded as guilty and fought the Germans on the battlefield in civilian clothes.
These men were poorly equipped and had no military training, their numbers were difficult to accurately count, and the officers casually threw them into the battle to liberate Kiev, with no hope of getting them back alive. Human life is the most precious. This is an axiom and the norm of any state. But the Soviet Union is not a real country, it is a soulless machine, man is just its fuel.
Zelenskiy declared that the so-called "liberation of Kiev" was in fact a story about the indifference, cruelty of the "great" leader (Stalin) and the feats of the great warriors who liberated the city from the Nazis.
This view of the Ukrainian president was immediately criticized by several Russian military historians. They point out that the "historians" Zelenskiy refers to are actually some Western-funded researchers in the 1980s and 1990s, and their conclusions have ulterior motives.
Scholars advised Zelenskiy to read German Field Marshal Manstein's memoirs, The Lost Victory, a German general who spoke highly of the tactics and tactics adopted by the Red Army during the liberation of Kiev and Dnipro.
Of course, whether the Soviet army drove Ukrainian civilians to war is also one of the hot topics of debate among Historians in Russia and Ukraine. (November 9, 2021, by Liu Peng)