> It was actually mostly Belarusian and Ukrainian soldiers who lost their lives on the front lines, not Russians. Because of course the Kremlin would decide to send them in first.

Yeah, this is probably bullshit. Russians will claim the numbers are heavily skewed the other way, but let’s look at some actual numbers.
(https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/unnj1t/what_...)

> I have some numbers on hand from Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna bez grifa sekretnosti (roughly Great Patriotic War declassified) by Krivosheev and Adronikov…

> Out of 8,668,400 total combat losses where nationality could be established, only 5,756,000 were Russian (66%). Ukrainians made up 1,377,400 losses (16%), Belarusians 252,900 (3%), Tatars 187,700 (2%), Jews 142,500 (1.6%), Kazakhs 125,500 (1.4%), Uzbeks 117,900 (1.4%) and other nationalities made up less than one percent of the total losses apiece.

> The number of prisoners of war tallied also show that Russians were the most numerous population involved, but that much. Out of 1,368,849 cases tallied up in the book, 657,339 POWs were Russian (48%), 386,568 were Ukrainian (28%), 103,053 were Belarusian (7.5%), 30,698 were Tatars (2%) 28,228 were Uzbeks (2%), 23,816 were Georgians (1.7%), 23,142 were Kazakh (1.7%), 20,850 were Azeri (1.5%), 20,067 were Armenians (1.5%) and then the remaining nationalities made up less than 1% each.

> When determining the percentages of each nationality that fought in the Red Army it is also important to remember that pre-war populations won't do you much good. Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics were fully occupied by the Germans for the majority of the war, meaning that any civilians who would come of fighting age during this time were unable to join the Red Army. Men of fighting age or nearing it would likely be kidnapped for forced labour in Germany or killed, which further drove down those numbers. In contrast, it would be much easier to draft someone who turned 18 in Eastern RSFSR, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc. so the proportion of these nationalities were higher.

It’s likely that Belarus and Ukraine probably did suffer more in some proportional sense. Is this because the Soviet Union followed a policy of ethnic Russian supremacism (under the rule of an ethnic Georgian dictator), or because Belarus and Ukraine are closer to Germany and got the worst of what the Nazis had to dish out? Likewise, I’ve also seen insinuations that the Holodomor was an ethnically motivated genocide of Ukrainians, and while it did affect Ukraine especially hard, there seems to be very good evidence that it was primarily motivated by communist class hatred towards the kulaks, combined with the sort of brutal forced reorganization of the economy that also led to millions of deaths at the hands of the Chinese and Cambodian communist regimes. Plenty of Russians also died in the terror-famine, and at any rate, the communist regime was preoccupied with questions of class and ideology. It’s much more fair to attribute their atrocities to these motivations more than the ethnic ones that people are perhaps more heavily fixated on today.

I’d also point out that when you’re talking about modern Ukraine, you’re not quite talking about the same country as pre-WWII Ukraine. The eastern parts of Poland that were annexed by the USSR according to the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact became the western parts of Belarus and Ukraine. The Ukrainian city of Lviv, also known by its Russian name Lvov had been the Polish city of Lwow. Prior to that, before Poland was granted independence in the aftermath of WWI, it was the Austro-Hungarian city of Lemberg. Similarly, the Crimea was transferred from the Russian SSR to the Ukrainian SSR in the 1950’s for administrative reasons, but even since then was still mostly populated with ethnic Russians.

Speaking of parts of history that don’t get talked about, let’s mention some other borders that got moved. Poland was ultimately “compensated” for the loss of its eastern territory to the USSR with the annexation of most of the easternmost parts of Germany, complete with the forced relocation of Germans into the now smaller territory of occupied Germany, a massive exercise in what most Americans would call “ethnic cleansing” if the US wasn’t utterly complicit in it. This happened to some degree across Eastern Europe during and after the war, and there are perhaps understandable and sympathetic motivations for that, what with the presence of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia and Poland providing excuses for German aggression at the beginning of the war. Nevertheless, that doesn’t quite justify annexing parts of Germany and driving out all of the Germans. Altogether, at least 12 million ethnic Germans were driven out of their homes during and after the war, with somewhere between half a million to 2.5 million of them dying in the process. And it’s not like it was always straightforward to accurately identify “ethnic Germans” either—some of the displaced and dead from the territories annexed to Poland were probably ethnic Poles with German citizenship.