The body of a dead child, a casualty of a major battle between German and Soviet forces in 1944 at the Battle of the Dnieper River, lay on the riverbank. One Soviet Red Army soldier knelt by the child's body to watch and mourn.

 　　The body of a dead child, a casualty of a major battle between German and Soviet forces in 1944 at the Battle of the Dnieper River, lay on the riverbank. One Soviet Red Army soldier knelt by the child's body to watch and mourn.

　After their defeat at the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943, the Germans completely lost control of the war and began a rapid retreat to the west. The Dnieper River, a major river in the Soviet Union, was an element of the Eastern Wall. The Germans planned to establish a foothold on the western bank of the Dnepr River to stop the Soviet Red Army offensive. On August 26, only about three days after the conclusion of the Battle of Kursk, the Soviets launched a massive offensive on a front of about 750 km from Smolensk to Azov. the Battle of the Dnieper River from August 26 to December 23, 1943, mobilized some 4 million soldiers on both sides and was one of the largest battles in history The German army hurriedly took over the Dnepr River.

　The Germans hastily evacuated all they could across the Dnieper River; on September 7, the Germans and SS received orders for a scorched-earth policy to remove all from abandoned Soviet territory; the Soviet Red Army's Dnepr airborne campaign, launched on September 24, was aborted, and some 3,000 more paratroopers were killed in action. Whenever the Soviet Red Army had the opportunity to cross the Dnepr River, it crossed it alone to the western bank, where it secured a bridgehead. After repelling the German counterattack, the Soviet Red Army began its offensive. The Germans did not have time to fortify their defenses, and a fierce battle ensued under constant fire from both sides. Across the Dnieper River, the river water turned red with blood and hundreds of soldiers died in battle before their eyes.

　The Germans immediately attacked the Soviet troops crossing the river and attempted to throw them back into the river. The Soviet Red Army Division lost up to about 70% of its personnel in defending the bridgehead it had secured before the main force arrived. Heavy fighting over the west bank of the Dnieper continued until the end of October 1943. The Soviet Red Army succeeded in establishing an important bridgehead on the western Ukrainian coast. Soviet forces held and expanded the Zaporozhye bridgehead in the south, cutting off German forces in the Crimea from the land; on November 6, Kiev was liberated. The Wehrmacht attempted to retake Kiev for a month and a half, and in the last ten days of December, the exhausted and debilitated German offensive finally came to an end on December 23, effectively ending the Battle of the Dnepr River. The Battle of the Dnepr River, in which some 400,000 Soviet soldiers were killed and up to 300,000 German soldiers were killed, was a major turning point in the Russian invasion of February 24, 2022, along the Dnepr River, which is over about a kilometer wide in parts of southern Ukraine, and about 80 years ago, the Ukrainian army suffered equally tremendous casualties.