The 1981 sports war movie Escape to Victory, starring Hollywood icons like Sylvester Stallone and Michael Caine alongside footballing legend Pele is based on a true event which took place in Ukraine during World War Two. The basic concept is that a football team is instructed to lose a game and is threatened with murder if they don’t comply. The film renders a westernised version of an actual game of football remembered as the “death match” played between a local football team in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, FC Start, and a German artillery unit team.
Adolf Hitler authorised Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, initiating an invasion of the Soviet Union that violated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression agreement that the two countries had only signed two years earlier. After a violent and murderous siege, the German army took control of Kyiv, a crucial component of the Nazis’ post-war expansion strategy, in less than three months.
When reflecting on the deaths and sacrifices made during World War Two, our outlook can perhaps naturally tend towards western insularity.
In contrast to the true human cost of war to tens of millions of people around the world, statistics are cold and impersonal. In this specific period of history, Ukraine’s sacrifices and death toll are unparalleled. With an estimated 20–27 million dead during World War Two, the Soviet Union by far experienced the largest loss of human life in any country. Unsurprisingly, these losses weren’t divided equally over the enormous territory of the USSR. In actuality, they were mostly concentrated in Ukraine, where Ukrainians bore close to 40% of the total Soviet death toll. According to the Oxford Companion to World War Two, more than one-sixth of the population of Ukraine—at least 7 million people—died during the conflict. The actual figure, though, is probably much higher.