Clambering over boulders, previous outdated tires and shellfish-encrusted scrap metallic, Oleksandr Shkalikov ventured onto the dry mattress of an enormous reservoir.
Out on this wasteland rested a haunting reminder of long-ago battles on this similar swath of southern Ukraine: a swastika, chipped right into a rock, had emerged from the receding water. The yr “1942’’ was written subsequent to it.
“Historical past is repeating itself,” Mr. Shkalikov, a tank driver on go away from the Ukrainian military, mentioned of the World Warfare II-era carving. He famous the timing: The Swastika had develop into seen due to a newer act of battle, the explosion on the Kakhovka dam in June that drained a reservoir the dimensions of the Nice Salt Lake in Utah.
“We’re preventing this battle on the identical panorama and with the identical weapons” as these utilized in World Warfare II, he mentioned, evoking the heavy artillery and tanks that also form the course of a land battle.
World Warfare II has been an ideological battlefield in right now’s battle in Ukraine, with Russia falsely calling Kyiv’s authorities neofascist and citing that because the rationale for its invasion. The nation’s army historical past is cropping up on the precise battlefield as properly, not simply with artifacts within the soil however within the classes Ukraine has realized from a battle fought way back.
Terrain and rivers have usually channeled the armies of right now into the websites of a number of the fiercest preventing in World Warfare II, when German and Soviet troops swept over the valleys and the expanses of wide-open plains.
Certainly, key battles have coincided so carefully with the websites of World Warfare II preventing, the Ukrainian army says, that troopers have discovered themselves taking cowl in 80-year-old concrete bunkers exterior Kyiv. They’ve found the bones of German troopers and Nazi bullet casings within the grime they faraway from trenches within the south.
World Warfare II started in what’s now Ukraine in 1939 with a Soviet invasion into territory then managed by Poland in western Ukraine, at a time when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had been in an alliance. When that pact broke down in 1941, Germany attacked and fought from west to east throughout Ukraine. The tide of battle modified in 1943 with the German defeat on the Battle of Stalingrad, and the Crimson Military then fought the Nazis in Ukraine transferring westward.
One in all Germany’s successes early on got here within the Battle of the Azov Sea in 1941, when its troops superior from Zaporizhzhia to Melitopol. Over the course of three weeks, Nazi forces lined this floor to maneuver into place to assault Crimea and encompass Crimson Military troopers within the Kherson area.
Ukraine is now echoing that World Warfare II offensive, preventing at websites southeast of Zaporizhzhia in what the Ukrainian army calls the “Melitopol path.” The strategic purpose is similar because it was eight a long time in the past — to isolate enemy troopers within the Kherson area and threaten Crimea — however Ukrainian troops are transferring much more slowly, having gained just a few miles in additional than a month.
“Historic parallels, sadly or fortunately, hold coming to the floor,” mentioned Vasyl Pavlov, an adviser to Ukraine’s normal headquarters who has carefully studied the similarities of the 2 wars.
Strategically, he mentioned, Ukraine’s generals most straight drew on World Warfare II historical past in devising a protection of the capital, Kyiv, final yr.
Within the opening days of the battle, the Russian military superior from Belarus towards the floodplain of the Irpin River — solely to seek out that the Ukrainians had blown up a dam and inundated an enormous space of fields, blocking the advance. It was a reprisal of a Soviet trick in 1941, when Moscow blew up an Irpin River dam to dam a German tank assault, Mr. Pavlov mentioned.
“Generals all the time put together to combat the final battle,” he mentioned. “However the Russian generals didn’t even put together to combat the final battle.”
German troops finally captured Kyiv in 1941; the Russians fought for a month within the suburbs final spring and withdrew.
When the present battle turned from Kyiv to the east, it equally retraced the battles of the second world battle. Then, as right now, the looping course of the Siversky Donets River grew to become a entrance line — with its excessive banks and swampy shores serving as pure boundaries as rival armies fought over the cities and cities alongside them.
In World Warfare II, the river shaped a portion of the so-called Mius Line, a defensive place the Nazis constructed to sluggish Soviet counterattacks after the Battle of Stalingrad.
Within the present battle, varied cities and villages alongside the Siversky Donets have come into play. Ukrainian forces used the river’s excessive bluffs and flood plains, for instance, to try a protection of town of Lysychansk, finally unsuccessful, and to stop a Russian crossing close to the city of Bilohorivka.
Each wars left riverside cities and villages in ruins. The present preventing has additionally broken with shrapnel pocks monuments erected to commemorate the World Warfare II preventing.
The village of Staryi Saltiv within the Kharkiv area was touched by each wars, and was largely destroyed every time.
Lidiya Pechenizka, 92, who has lived within the village her complete life, recalled that in each conflicts the preventing was largely outlined by the artillery shells flying over the river at enemy troopers holing up within the village. For civilians, the experiences had been related: cowering in basements and root cellars.
“It was horrible,” Ms. Pechenizka mentioned in an interview this spring.
With neither Russia nor Ukraine capable of acquire air superiority, the present preventing has hinged totally on artillery and tanks, because the preventing did in World Warfare II. Apart from the addition of drones and complicated anti-tank missiles, the armies are preventing with related weaponry.
The Ukrainian counteroffensive south of town of Zaporizhzhia is, Mr. Pavlov mentioned, “a direct analogy” to the German offensive in September 1941. The targets had been related: to maneuver throughout the plains, minimize provide strains to Russian troops on the japanese financial institution of the Dnipro and transfer into place to threaten the isthmus of the Crimean Peninsula.
However the parallels go solely to this point.
In World Warfare II, the Crimson Military didn’t have time to fortify defensive strains on the plains; the Germans rapidly superior to the Azov Sea, surrounding tens of hundreds of Soviet troops in a pocket to the north.
This time, the Russian have had months to dig in. Consequently, Ukraine’s counteroffensive has stalled within the face of formidable fortifications of minefields, trenches and bunkers.
In different methods, too, the preventing is distinct. The Nazi and Soviet armies fought throughout Ukraine transferring perpendicular to the north-to-south circulate of the principle rivers. Ukraine within the counteroffensive is usually transferring parallel to the rivers, offering at the very least one army benefit; it doesn’t should undertake many perilous water crossings.
Within the winter of 1943-44, the Soviet Union misplaced waves of troopers in an east-to-west crossing of the Dnipro River.
Among the our bodies had been discovered a long time later by a Ukrainian nongovernmental group, Reminiscence and Glory, which looked for World Warfare II useless from either side to offer dignified burials. Since its founding in 2007, it says, the group has discovered greater than 500 stays of troopers who fought in World Warfare II in Ukraine.
Final yr, Reminiscence and Glory members joined the Ukrainian Military to look battlefields for troopers reported lacking in motion. It has discovered greater than 200 our bodies from the present battle — usually in the identical websites the place World Warfare II useless had been discovered, mentioned Leonid Ignatiev, the director.
“Once you dig right into a trench” searching for our bodies of troopers lately killed, he mentioned, “you discover a trench from World Warfare II.”
Close to the city of Novy Kamenki, within the Kherson area, the group lately looked for a Ukrainian soldier who had gone lacking in motion. As an alternative, they discovered the bones of a German soldier, Mr. Ignatiev mentioned. The stays had been despatched for burial in a cemetery for German battle useless in Ukraine.
“The excessive floor, the locations for protection, they’re all the identical,” Mr. Ignatiev mentioned.
Zaporizhzhia, a sprawling industrial metropolis on the shore of the disappearing Kakhovka Reservoir, was occupied by Nazi forces in World Warfare II and is a frontline metropolis right now the place air sirens wail a number of instances a day and Russian missiles sometimes streak in and explode.
However when the water receded from town’s lakefront embankment after the dam burst, it was unexploded munitions from the previous that posed the gravest hazard. Ukraine’s emergency providers mentioned the sandbars and new islands rising from the reservoir “turned out to be surprisingly cluttered with explosive objects from World Warfare II.”
Demining crews have discovered and eliminated World Warfare II aviation bombs, the service mentioned.
Mr. Shkalikov, the tank driver, whose house is a brief stroll from the shore, fought within the opening days of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in fields to the southeast of town.
After his tank hit a mine, he was given go away from his unit, returned house and started exploring the dry lake mattress. Discovering the swastika rising from the water, he mentioned, “didn’t shock me in any respect.”
The wars are separated by a long time, however “the panorama hasn’t modified,” he mentioned.
Maria Varenikova and Yurii Shyvala contributed reporting from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine.
