in the war, mostly as soldiers in the Red Army, than Russia. They had more battles and lost more civilians due to the actual war than Russia did.
Putin claims the Red Army as the "Russian Army." It was a Slavic army: Heavier, percentage-wise than you'd expect, Ukrainian than Russian. That's a truth that Putin's history cannot ever allow. It was, the story goes, Russians sacrificing for the "lesser Slavs," big brother Russia fighting for their "little brothers"--Poles, Czechs, etc. Somehow the Ukrainians got lost in the shuffle, "Russian" until 1991 and invisible in the official history in Russia after that (to the extent they weren't sanctified by the spilling of Russian blood in defending them). I mean, in the '50s and '60s some war novels had Ukrainians resisting the Germans but if you looked at the same novel 10, 15 years later all the characters were suddenly just plain Russians. (Fortunately I did my shopping in person at a Russian bookstore that had gotten books in the '50s into the '00s, seldom sold all of them, so if you dug you'd find books for $1.25 that were from the mid-late '50s and unrevised/censored--and unobtainable in the USSR.)
Some Ukrainians welcomed the Germans during the war. They had fought the Russians before the Germans arrived, they fought the Russians after the Germans arrived, they continued fighting the Russians after the Germans left. Why? Because they wanted the Russians gone, not the Germans present.
Some anti-Russian fighters sided with Hitler overall. Mostly they retreated with the Hitlerian forces.
Some participated and sided with the Germans in killing Jews. Some had, prior to German presence, been killing Jews. Some were killing Poles--we hear less about them, but Poles were a non-trivial presence because of centuries of Polish "settler-colonialists" having the upper hand. Hard to forget that kind of oppression, I'm told. Some killed both. Some killed just Jews or just Poles. Some killed neither. Just fought Russians.
One group--there were so many and they kept splitting and merging--continued to fight and retreat. But had the iron-clad edict not to fire knowingly on Western Allied forces. And when they retreated far enough back that the advancing Western Allied forces met them, simply lay down their arms. Nobody trusted them to continue to do what they'd been doing, fight the Russians.
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