Climbing over rocks, old tires and scrap metal surrounded by shellfish, Oleksandr Shkalikov ventured onto the dry bed of a vast reservoir.
In this wasteland remains a haunting reminder of the long-ago wars in this same region of southern Ukraine: a swastika, cut into the rock, emerges from the receding waters. Next to it is written “1942”.
“History is repeating itself,” said Mr., a tank driver on leave from the Ukrainian army. He noted the timing: The swastika was visible because of a recent war action, a June explosion at Kakhovka Dam that drained a reservoir the size of Utah’s Great Salt Lake.
“We are fighting this war in 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 land warfare.
World War II is an ideological battleground in today’s war in Ukraine, which Russia has falsely called the government in Kyiv neofascist and cited as justification for its invasion. The country’s military history thrives on actual battlefields, not just with artifacts in the soil, but also with lessons learned from Ukraine’s long-ago war.
The terrain and rivers often lead today’s troops to some of the fiercest fighting sites of World War II, when German and Soviet forces swept across valleys and wide-open plains.
In fact, the Ukrainian military says key battles so closely match World War II battlegrounds that soldiers are sheltering themselves in 80-year-old concrete bunkers outside Kyiv. They found bones of German soldiers and Nazi bullet casings in dirt dug up from trenches in the south.
World War II began in 1939 with the Soviet invasion of what is now Ukraine, then in western Ukraine controlled by Poland, which at the time was allied with the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. When that agreement broke down in 1941, Germany invaded and fought from west to east across Ukraine. The tide of the war turned with the German defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, and then the Red Army moving west to fight the Nazis in Ukraine.
A German success was achieved in 1941 at the Battle of the Sea of Azov, when its forces advanced from Zaporizhia to Melitopol. Over the course of three weeks, Nazi forces covered this ground to move into position to invade Crimea and encircle Red Army troops in the Kherson region.
Ukraine is now reverberating as a World War II aggressor, fighting in places southeast of Zaporizhia in what the Ukrainian military calls the “Melitopol direction.” The strategic goal remains the same as eight decades ago — to isolate enemy forces in the Kherson region and threaten Crimea — but Ukrainian forces are moving more slowly, gaining 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 comparisons between the two wars.
Strategically, he said, Ukraine’s generals drew directly on World War II history in planning the defense of the capital, Kyiv, last year.
In the opening days of the war, Russian troops advanced from Belarus to the floodplain of the Irpin River – the Ukrainians had blown up a dam and flooded vast fields, blocking the advance. It was in retaliation for a Soviet tactic in 1941, when Moscow blew up a dam on the Irpin River to prevent a German tank attack, Mr. Pavlov said.
“Generals always prepare to fight the last battle,” he said. “But the Russian generals were not ready to face the last battle.”
German forces finally captured Kyiv in 1941; The Russians fought for a month in the suburbs last spring and withdrew.
As the current war turned east from Kyiv, it reversed the battles of World War II in the same way. Then, as today, the looping course of the Siversky Donets River was the forerunner – its high banks and marshy banks acting as natural barriers as rival armies battled over the cities and towns that flanked them.
In World War II, the river formed part of the so-called Meuse Line, a defensive position built by the Nazis to slow Soviet counterattacks after the Battle of Stalingrad.
In the current war, various cities and villages along the Siversky Donets have come into action. Ukrainian forces used the river’s high bluffs and flood plains, for example, to attempt the defense of the city of Lysychansk, ultimately failing, and to block a Russian crossing near the town of Bilohoryvka.
Both wars destroyed riverside towns and villages. The current fighting is marred with shrapnel pox memorials erected to commemorate the World War II battle.
The village of Stari Saltiv in the Kharkiv region was touched by both wars and was largely destroyed each time.
Lidia Pechenizka, 92, who has lived in the village all her life, recalled that the battle in both conflicts was largely defined by artillery shells flying over the river at enemy soldiers hiding in the village. For civilians, the experiences are similar: cowering in basements and original basements.
“It’s scary,” Ms. Pechenizka said in an interview this spring.
Since neither Russia nor Ukraine can claim air superiority, the current fight relies heavily on artillery and tanks, much like the fight in World War II. Except for the addition of drones and sophisticated anti-tank missiles, the armies are fighting with similar weapons.
Mr. Pavlov said. The objectives were similar: to move across the plains, cut supply lines to the Russian army on the east bank, move to a position threatening the Isthmus of the Dnipro and the Crimean Peninsula.
But the parallels only go so far.
In World War II, the Red Army did not have time to strengthen defensive lines in the plains; The Germans quickly advanced to the Sea of Azov, encircling tens of thousands of Soviet troops in a pocket to the north.
This time, the Russians had months to dig in. As a result, Ukraine’s counteroffensive has stalled in the face of formidable fortifications of minefields, trenches and bunkers.
In other ways, the fight is different. Nazi and Soviet armies fought across Ukraine by moving perpendicularly from the north to south flow of the main rivers. On the counterattack Ukraine is moving largely parallel to the rivers, providing at least one military advantage; It does not have to undertake many dangerous water crossings.
In the winter of 1943-44, the Soviet Union lost waves of soldiers crossing the Dnipro River from east to west.
Some of the bodies were discovered decades later by a Ukrainian non-governmental group, Memory and Glory, which sought World War II dead from both sides to provide dignified burials. Since its founding in 2007, the group has found the remains of more than 500 soldiers who fought in World War II in Ukraine, it says.
Last year, the members of Memory and Glory joined the Ukrainian army, when soldiers were reported missing on the battlefield. It has found more than 200 bodies from the current war — often found in the same places as World War II dead, director Leonid Ignatiev said.
“When you dig a trench” looking for the bodies of recently killed soldiers, “you find a trench from World War II,” he said.
Near the town of Novy Kamenki in the Kherson region, the group searched for a Ukrainian soldier who had recently gone missing in action. Instead, they found the bones of a German soldier, Mr. Ignatiev said. Remains sent to be buried in cemetery for German war dead in Ukraine.
“The high ground, the places for protection, they are the same,” Mr. Ignatiev said.
Zaporizhia, a sprawling industrial city on the banks of the disappearing Kakhovka Reservoir, was occupied by Nazi forces in World War II and today is a front-line city where air sirens wail several times a day and Russian missiles occasionally strike and explode.
But when the water receded from the city’s lakeshore after the dam burst, unexploded ordnance posed a greater threat. Ukraine’s emergency services said sandbars and new islands emerging from the reservoir were “surprisingly cluttered with World War II explosives”.
Demining crews found and removed World War II aviation bombs, the service said.
Mr. Shakalikov, a tank driver whose home is not far from the coast, fought in the early days of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the fields southeast of the city.
After his tank hit a mine, he was given leave from his unit, returned home and began exploring a dry lake bed. Seeing the swastika emerging from the water, he said, “I’m not surprised.”
The wars are separated by decades, but “the landscape hasn’t changed,” he said.
Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Zaporizhia, Ukraine.
