Ukraine - March, 1944

The Spring thaw in Ukraine turned the roads and fields into a quagmire of mud. Retreating German soldiers did the best they could to destroy the railroads, the only viable means of transporting supplies across the muddy fields.

Here is an account written by a Soviet platoon commander faced with the challenge of moving his platoon across Ukraine in pursuit of retreating Germans. nearly out of ammunition and having lost the battalion field kitchen, the platoon depended on the kindness of local peasants to feed them:

"...we could not always have a normal meal — the battalion kitchen was stuck in the dirt somewhere and could not catch up with us. It was impossible to find a dry spot during breaks, we had to sit down right in the dirt and immediately fell asleep for 10 or 15 minutes. Some soldiers even fell asleep while walking from exhaustion. One should not forget that most of the soldiers were just 18 years old.

"We only survived on food provided by the population of the villages that we liberated from the Germans. At night and very rarely during the day we would make one-and-a—half- or two-hour stops in those villages to have a snack with what God had in store for us.

"The population welcomed us warmly, regardless of how hard it was for them to provide food to soldiers; they always found some nice treats — some villagers boiled chicken, others boiled potatoes and cut lard (soldiers dubbed this kind of catering ‘a grandmother’s ration’).

"However, such attitudes were common only in the Eastern Ukraine. As soon as we entered the Western Ukraine, that had passed to the Soviet Union from Poland in 1940, the attitude of the population was quite different — people hid from us in their houses, as they disliked and feared the Muscovites and Kastaps (a disparaging name for Russians in Ukraine – translators comment)."

So the dislike of Western Ukrainians for Russians that we see  in today's Ukraine is nothing new.