The roots of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine go back decades and run deep. The current conflict is more than one country taking over another; it is \u2014 in the words of one U.S. official \u2014 a shift in “the world order.”<\/p>\n
Here are some helpful resources to make sense of it all.
Rachel Treisman <\/a>
Boris Romantschenko reads from a piece of paper into a microphone at the Buchenwald memorial on April 12, 2015. He was killed by Russian shelling in Kharkiv. Michael Reichel\/Gedenkst\u00c3\u00a4tte Buchenwald <\/b> hide caption<\/b><\/b>
Boris Romantschenko reads from a piece of paper into a microphone at the Buchenwald memorial on April 12, 2015. He was killed by Russian shelling in Kharkiv.
Among the victims of Russia’s war in Ukraine is a Holocaust survivor who devoted his life to preserving its history.
Boris Romantschenko survived four concentration camps including Buchenwald, Dora and Bergen Belsen. The 96-year-old was killed last week when Russian forces shelled his apartment building in Kharkiv, the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation said in a tweet<\/a>.
“Now he has been killed by a bullet that hit his house,” they wrote. “We are stunned.”
Citing Romantschenko’s granddaughter, the group said he lived in a multistory building that was hit by Russian shelling on Friday.
Boris Romantschenko survived the concentration camps #Buchenwald<\/a>, #Peenem\u00fcnde<\/a>, #Dora<\/a> and #BergenBelsen<\/a>. Now he has been killed by a bullet that hit his house in #Charkiv<\/a>, #Ukraine<\/a>. He was 96 years old. We are stunned. pic.twitter.com\/ZZIK2OdbAu<\/a>
It also said, according to an English translation, that he “campaigned intensively for the memory of the Nazi crimes and was vice president of the Buchenwald-Dora International Committee.”
The foundation shared a photo<\/a> of several men standing in a row in front of various countries’ flags, with one man reading from a piece of paper.
It said that the picture was taken during a 2012 commemoration event marking the anniversary of Buchenwald’s liberation and that Romanchenko was reading out the Oath of Buchenwald<\/a>, which was written for the first memorial service for the dead at the camp after it was liberated in 1945, to “build a new world of peace and freedom.”
2012 verlas Boris Romantschenko (auf dem Foto zweiter von rechts) w\u00e4hrend der Gedenkveranstaltung zum Jahrestag der Befreiung des KZ Buchenwald den Schwur von Buchenwald zum "Aufbau einer neuen Welt des Friedens und der Freiheit". pic.twitter.com\/CorJ5eM6Ah<\/a>
Although the exact death toll of Russia’s aggression in Kharkiv \u2014 Ukraine’s second-largest city \u2014 is not clear, police there said<\/a> at least 250 civilians have died.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly described a goal of his military operation as the “denazification” of Ukraine, a claim that scholars have told NPR distorts both history and reality<\/a>.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy mentioned Romantschenko in his daily remarks on Monday, noting how much he had been through.
“He survived … the death conveyors created by the Nazis. And he was killed by a Russian projectile that hit an ordinary Kharkiv high-rise building,” Zelenskyy said. “Each passing day of this war makes it increasingly clear what their ‘denazification’ is.”
Earlier this month, Russian strikes in Kyiv hit the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center<\/a>, where Nazis killed nearly 34,000 Jewish people over a 36-hour period in September 1941.
Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, said in a tweet<\/a> at the time that it was “history repeating.”
“To the world: What is the point of saying never again for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar?” he wrote.
This story originally appeared in the Morning Edition<\/em> live blog<\/a>.
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