Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, the BBC ran a charming story about a small but beautiful Ukrainian Catholic church near Lockerbie, in Scotland.
Built in 1947 by POWs brought from Italy to the UK after WWII, the Beeb’s story about it told no lies. Ukrainian churches are beautiful, with their distinctive construction, decoration, and intricate altar-cloth embroidery. The structure deserves its heritage listing for those reasons alone. Large numbers of Ukrainian POWs did indeed finish up in these Islands after WWII, typically after imprisonment on Italy’s Adriatic coast. Those who did not stay in the UK often immigrated to Canada and elsewhere in the Commonwealth.
What the BBC piece—and others like it published since Europe awoke on the morning of February 24th to news of an invasion the like of which has not been seen since WWII—obscures, however, is notable. The men who built that chapel fought for the Third Reich, not Britain’s then-ally, the Soviet Union. After systematic and deliberate brutalisation at the hands of Stalinist Soviet Communism, significant numbers of Ukrainians threw their lot in with Hitler. Surely, they reasoned, he couldn’t be any worse than Stalin.
