Enemy collaboration in occupied Ukraine evokes painful memories in Europe – and the response risks a rush to vigilante justice
Collaboration with the enemy is a common and often painful part of armed conflict.
- Collaboration with the enemy is a common and often painful part of armed conflict.
- It is also an issue in which I have both a professional and personal interest.
- The war in Ukraine is, in many ways, a transparent conflict, with cellphone images, drone cameras and satellite imagery feeding a flow of data to social media platforms and news outlets.
Liberating powers
- In June 2022, Bucha was the first liberated city from which collaboration with Russians was reported.
- The problem of collaboration is especially thorny in Ukraine’s Donbass region, with its long history of Russian-Ukrainian cultural and linguistic interaction.
- Since the summer of 2022, the front has stalemated, with a little more than half the region under Russian control.
What to do with collaborators
- On March 3, 2022, the Ukrainian parliament amended the country’s criminal code with two new laws criminalizing any type of cooperation with an aggressor state.
- It also prohibits cooperation with an aggressor state, its occupation administrations and its armed forces or paramilitary forces.
- The changes to Ukraine’s criminal code reflected concern among Ukraine’s leaders that collaboration with Russia would give the invading forces both ideological and military advantages.
- Yet in the near-daily speeches made since then by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, I was unable to find any reference to the need to root out collaborators.
The rush to (in)justice
- Were they acting out of a survival instinct or did they really sympathize with the Russians?
- Liberation brings tremendous release, not only of newfound freedom but of temptations toward revenge against those who once supported the occupier.
- This could be one reason why societies that experience occupation followed by liberation are prone to vengeance-seeking and lawlessness.
- The Netherlands, even with its global reputation for upholding human rights and democratic values, was no exception to the rush to judgment of suspected collaborators after World War II.
The post-occupation challenge
- A similar rush to justice appears to be playing out in parts of liberated Ukraine.
- Journalist Joshua Yaffa, writing from liberated Izyum for The New Yorker, found a town in which hundreds had been questioned or detained on suspicion of collaboration with occupying Russians.
Families divided
- And the longer the Russian occupation goes on, the more those in the occupied areas will be pressured into everyday complicity.
- As with the Netherlands at the end of Nazi occupation, the search for collaborators in Ukraine will not only be made by police and partisans; it will happen within families coming to terms with the past.
Ronald Niezen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.