Austria has identified 11,000 Ukrainians who died during the country's liberation in World War II

This study was carried out by the Ludwig Betzmann Institute for Military Research (BIK) on behalf of the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, Ukrinform reports, citing APA.

“Contrary to popular belief, the Red Army was a multinational and multi-ethnic force, including Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Belarusians, Moldovans, Caucasians and Siberians, who quickly captured most of Austria's territory,” said historian Stefan Karner, founder of the BIK.

As part of a project dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the liberation of Austria by the Red Army, the burial site of approximately 90,000 Soviet soldiers who died in Austria from 1941 to 1955 was examined.

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“Of these, 11,067 were identified as Ukrainians. This represents 21% of the total number of Soviet soldiers who died whose nationality was clearly established. Given the share of Ukrainians in the USSR population at that time (16.5%), this indicates that Ukrainians made a “disproportionately” large contribution to the liberation of Austria. Most of them died in 1945, in the last months of the war. Their graves are scattered throughout the country,” the report says.

As Karner emphasizes, among the Ukrainians buried in Austria there are not only military personnel. About two thirds of the graves belong to former concentration camp prisoners, prisoners of war, forced laborers or civilian internees.

The Austrian Ministry of the Interior, which is responsible for the maintenance of military and memorial graves, emphasized that the goal of the project is also to return the names of the deceased Ukrainians.

Karner also drew a parallel with the present. According to him, Russian aggression against Ukraine and the war propaganda associated with it clearly demonstrate how important it is to work with historical memory. After all, part of the Kremlin narrative is to belittle Ukraine's historical contribution to the fight against Nazism.

“At the same time, it was Ukraine, along with Poland and Belarus, that suffered the greatest losses from the German occupation and military actions,” the Austrian historian concluded.

We remind you that during World War II, the capital of Austria was liberated during the Vienna Offensive Operation, conducted by troops of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts with the support of the 1st Bulgarian Army. According to some estimates, more than 41,000 Red Army soldiers were killed during the operation, and more than 136,000 were wounded.

For a long time, Russian propaganda ignored the fact that Ukrainians, as part of the Soviet troops, made a significant contribution to the liberation of Europe from Nazism.