It has been 75 years since the day Nazi Germany unconditionally surrendered to the victorious Allies after six years of the most brutal war in human history.
According to official figures, over 700 Ukrainian cities and towns were razed to the ground in the hostilities, and between eight and 10 million Ukrainians were killed.
Ukraine marks May 8 as the Day of Remembrance and Reconciliation, in a bid to mourn the sad legacy of World War I, and May 9 as Victory Day.
The Kyiv Post met with several elderly war veterans living in Kyiv and asked them to share the stories of their youth, their days in arms and their destiny after the great war.
Vasyl Kliuy
93 years old
“I still cannot forget our last big raid at sea,” says Vasyl Kliuy, a 93-year-old veteran of naval warfare in the Black Sea.
“It was August 1944 when the Germans were just about to lose Odesa. So we got an intel cable: There will be a convoy of 15 vessels evacuating German troops from Odesa. We were in a group of nine submarines ready to meet them.”
“And we sank them all. Not a single vessel survived. Then we broke the surface and saw Germans paddling in the water all around, screaming ‘Hitler kaput!,’ begging to be rescued.”
“We didn’t take anyone on board, we couldn’t. I still cannot forget this — they were our enemies, but they were humans, too, left for dead in the open sea.”
Kliuy enlisted in the Soviet navy at the age of 16, adding two years to his age, and was trained as a radio operator. For almost three years, he served in a Shchuka class submarine engaged in the cutthroat undersea warfare against German U-boats and supply transports in the Black Sea.
“Our foremost mission was to prevent any vessels — German, Italian, Romanian, Bulgarian — from entering the sea via the Dardanelles,” Kliuy says.
“Germans were always giving us a hard time. There were days when we were forced to stay underwater for two days, running out of air and surviving only thanks to compressed air tanks.”
Kliuy’s submarine killed a total of 11 enemy vessels throughout the years of war. Shortly after his 1944 raid, Soviet forces retook Odesa and this marked the end of Kliuy’s participation in the hostilities.
After the war, he returned to live a peaceful life in his home village in central Ukraine and then built a long career in the Soviet Union’s agriculture industry.
Kliuy stayed in touch with fellow sailors from his submarine throughout their lives. The old crew gathered together several times at the submarine commanding officer’s home in Moscow.
“Our commander died in 1982, and I continued visiting his grave year after year with my fellow guys. But now all of them are dead — I am the last living crew member.”
Despite his venerable age, Kliuy has not retired yet — he continues working at Ukraine’s Academy of Agricultural Science in Kyiv.
Anatoliy Kapatsevych
93 years old
“We were patriots of our homeland, and we still are,” says 93-year-old Anatoliy Kapatsevych, a former Soviet Army infantry scout and tank commander.
As a teenager, he survived the Siege of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). He was evacuated from the encircled city, where people were dying from starvation and bombardments in 1942.
After recovering from the long hunger, he left his new home and went to the front line to enlist at 16.
“I was 153 centimeters tall, still pale and lean after Leningrad, my voice was squeaky,” he remembered.
“No one had any idea what to do with me. But then a recon unit said: ‘Hah, we might need such a small lad.’ So I became a scout who would later sustain two combat injuries.”
With his new family, the 271st Rifle Division’s 869th Motorized Rifle Regiment, he took part in the Battle of Kyiv.
At only 17, he made an excellent combat scout distinguished by the highest command.
“In spring 1944, my team was on a recon mission behind the lines,” Kapatsevych says. “And I noticed an Opel car bogged down in the dirt. It turned out that it was transporting an SS colonel. I shot and killed his driver and his aide in the front seats, but the officer — a rather old man — tried to escape. I couldn’t carry him of course, so I knocked him into the dirt, sat on him and waited until my comrades came.”
Up to this very day, Kapatsevych keeps in his cupboard cabinet a trophy he gained on that day: the colonel’s ring marked with the SS insignia.
For Kapatsevych, the war ended after Soviet troops recaptured the city of Mukacheve in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia region in October 1944. Soviet Marshal Ivan Koniev noticed the distinguished young soldier and ordered to send him to study at the Armed Forces Academy in Kyiv.
“I begged Koniev, with tears in my eyes, not to take me off the front line. But he was unshakeable: ‘We need to make a good officer out of you.’
Kapatsevych later became a lecturer at the tank academy, sharing his combat experience with young cadets.
But his military career abruptly ended in 1954, after Kapatsevych participated in the Soviet army’s ill-fated Totskoye nuclear exercises. He was among nearly 45,000 Soviet troops deliberately exposed to the radioactive fallout of a 40,000-ton nuclear bomb detonated as part of the maneuvers.
The ensuring radiation sickness turned a healthy young officer, the boxing champion of his combat unit, into a disabled person.
He was honorably discharged from the military and then worked for many years at the Dovzhenko Film Studio in Kyiv.
Valentyna Kulinich
99 years old
World War II left Valentyna Kulinich nothing to lose within just a few months.
Shortly after the June 1941 invasion, she was notified that her husband was missing in action. Her 2-year-old daughter also died.
So she trained as a nurse and started her service at the Soviet 28th Army field hospital.
By October 1942, she was a senior battlefield medic deployed with Soviet 2nd Battalion, 6th Guards Armored Brigade.
Her formation was among many flung into the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the bloodiest battles in human history, which in many ways determined the outcome of World War II.
“Our battalion was effectively surrounded in the town of Barrikady (just north of Stalingrad),” Kulinich recalls.
“The town was all burning, and we saw that the Germans were about to spring the trap. Night was coming down, and they were getting reinforcements for a final strike upon us. We were sitting under a ruined railway pass, and the battalion commander said: ‘We are going to try and break through. But you stay here with the wounded and wait for us.'”
On that night, Kulinich had to care for four injured fighters, including one heavily wounded lieutenant who was unable to move.
“Waiting is a difficult thing in war,” she says. “Especially when you have no idea what are the chances that our guys make it and if they come back for us anyway.”
The chances of surviving that death trap were low — German troops were closing in with every hour.
“I peeped out beyond the railway embankment and saw a German tank standing nearly 100 meters away from us and firing round after round,” she says. “And I realized: I must get away with the wounded while we still can.”
Soon, all hell broke loose and the ruined town turned into a site of mass slaughter again: Soviet troops launched a counter-offensive.
Through the rain of bullets and shells, the young nurse carried the heavily wounded officer, assisted by a less seriously injured fellow soldier.
By the light of early morning, the group managed to make it to the Volga River bank, to a spot where Soviet ferries were still evacuating the critically wounded to the other side of the river.
The wounded soldiers survived that day thanks to Kulinich, and she was even lucky to meet one of them in a hospital in the Stalingrad rear.
“Truth be told, my battalion commander lashed out at me later for taking such a risk,” she says.
Later, Kulinich also sustained a combat injury in the Battle of Stalingrad.
After treatment, she served as a field hospital nurse and entered Germany in 1945.
She was honorably discharged in 1948 and worked as a school teacher and university lecturer for decades.
Volodymyr Budionniy
97 years old
In June 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Volodymyr Budionniy was working as a turner at a factory.
“We were so young,” he remembers.
“I returned home really late after a dance party with girls. And very early in the morning, I was woken up by the dormitory supervisor running around and yelling: ‘War! We’re having a war now!’ Me and the other guys were really angry at him interrupting our sleep, but it turned out he was right — Germany had invaded.”
As an essential industry worker, Budionniy was first evacuated to the Ural region together with the whole factory. But in 1942, he was mobilized to the Red Army and became an infantry scout section commander.
He was almost immediately thrown into action in what became known as the Battle of Kursk — one of the pivotal and bloodiest battles of World War II, which Budionniy remembers as his heaviest days during the war.
“Once upon a time, I got trapped in a trench for six hours,” he recalls.
“A shell landed nearby, and I ended up covered with earth in my trench. After I managed to get out, I realized that our troops had retreated and I was all alone — and Germans were all around.”
“It was getting dark, and they were walking around and killing off the wounded. I got back into my foxhole and played dead. The Germans, fortunately, didn’t notice I was still breathing.”
Budionniy managed to get back to the Soviet lines. He was suspected of having been recruited by the Nazis, and he had to undergo long, brutal interrogations.
But, eventually, he managed to clear his name after he showed that very trench and his rifle left in it to the interrogators. Instead of execution, Budionniy was decorated with the Order of Glory.
He went on fighting Nazis in Belarus, Poland, and Germany — until his path took him to the ruined stairs of the Reichstag.
“On April 29, (1945,) my combat unit was among many sent to storm its front entrance,” Budionniy said.
“Fighting inside the building was absolutely insane. That was pure slaughter in each and every room when we broke in, a bloodbath that I can’t describe. We tore through corridors stumbling over bodies of the dead on the floor, through the smoke and dust, screaming.”
“We somehow managed to make it to the second floor. I opened the door to some small room and saw a German in there, a really young guy, probably from Hitler Jugend. He shot me — the bullet went through my neck, barely missing the artery. My comrades helped me to find cover and then knifed the German.”
This was his last combat injury.
The war was over — and Budyonniy returned home to build a career in the Soviet government in Ukraine.
Oleksandr Utkin
93 years old
When the military recruitment officer, looking at a line of nearly 300 young boys aged 16, asked if there was anyone among them volunteering for military service, all of them stepped forward.
Oleksandr Utkin, just a schoolboy then, was one of them.
That was the year 1943, in a small town in Russia’s sub-Arctic Far North.
Almost all of those 300 boys got their rifles after a short basic training and were thrown into the Battle of Kursk, where most of them were likely killed soon after.
But Utkin was lucky to be sent to study hydroacoustics. After 6 months of training, he got an appointment at the Soviet Black Sea Fleet.
He spent a month just trying to make it to the fleet’s main bases in Georgia’s Poti and Batumi. The dramatic battles of Ukraine, Belarus and the Black Sea were raging at the time, leading to transportation chaos on Soviet territory.
“I served in minesweeping boats in waters close to Turkish territory, where German submarines were extremely active,” he says.
“My job was to always heed the echo of the radar scanning the abyss — and understand what it is that I’m hearing: an underwater rock, a fish shoal or an enemy submarine’s metal body.”
He spent more than a year in the naval war.
“On May 9, 1945, we were having a rest after another mission at the Batumi port,” Utkin recalls.
“And at approximately 4 a.m. we heard someone firing a salvo from our own 45-millimeter gun. “Victory!”
“That was when the news of Germany’s surrender reached us. So we all came to Batumi’s downtown to celebrate, and local people invited us to their wineries. I was only 18 then, and I was a sportsman — and I got a bit drunk for the first time in my life on that day.”
After the war, Utkin continued with his service in the Soviet navy.
He won numerous championships in track and field athletics and continued training youngsters, including for the Olympic Games, after his retirement in 1974.
