Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday said Ukraine would stop celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany on May 9, instead marking the event a day earlier.
The announcement, on the day — May 8 — that most of Europe celebrates victory over Nazism, cements a break with Ukraine’s history as part of the Soviet Union.
“Today I am submitting a bill to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine proposing that May 8 be the Day of Remembrance and Victory over Nazism in the Second World War of 1939-1945,” Zelenskyy said in a video statement standing in front of a war memorial on a hill above Kyiv.
Russia celebrates the defeat of the Nazis on May 9 because the German surrender was intentionally signed at 11:01 p.m. on the evening of May 8 in Berlin, to ensure the clocks had ticked over to May 9 in Moscow and to give the Soviet Union a day all of its own.
Most Soviet satellites also commemorated the event on May 9, but some have already moved to May 8 since the Cold War.
Russia calls May 9 “Victory Day,” while May 8 is known as “Victory in Europe Day.” World War II would end later that year, with Japan’s unconditional surrender in September 1945.
Zelenskyy said that Ukraine, like other European nations, would instead adopt May 9 as “Europe Day,” a celebration of the “peace and unity in Europe” after the war introduced by the Council of Europe in 1964.
“Together with all of free Europe, we will celebrate Europe Day on May 9 in Ukraine. A united Europe, the basis of which should be and will be peace.”
“We will commemorate our historic unity — the unity of all Europeans who destroyed Nazism and will destroy Rashism [a term the Ukrainian government often uses to mean Russian fascism].”
Meanwhile, Ukrainian Ambassador Oleksii Makeiev on Monday joined Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner and German Foreign Office minister of state Tobias Lindner to lay wreaths at the Neue Wache central memorial to the victims of World War II in Berlin.
Makeiev explicitly said he would not be laying wreaths and flowers at any of the Soviet memorials in Berlin, as has been done in the past. (DW)