On November 17, 1943, in Stanyslaviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, a city in western Ukraine, German military police surrounded a theater and searched students and citizens, finding pistols on about 38 people. Immediately, the German military police shot them dead in front of their acquaintances and friends in the vicinity of the theater.

 　On November 17, 1943, in Stanislaviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, a city in western Ukraine, German military police surrounded a theater and searched students and citizens in the theater, finding pistols in about 38 of them. Immediately, the German military police shot them dead in front of their acquaintances and friends in the vicinity of the theater. Across the street from the theater congregation, about 27 members of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) were shot dead in a public execution in front of the walls of the synagogue's meeting hall.

 On the Eastern Front of World War II, the German surprise invasion of the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941. The Germans moved quickly, and by the end of November, they had almost all of Ukraine under their control. Initially, the Germans were greeted as liberators by some Ukrainian residents. When the Germans invaded Lviv on June 30, the young radical members of the OUN-B who accompanied them declared the establishment of a provisional Ukrainian state on June 30. In August, the Nazis annexed Galicia to Poland, returned Bukovina to Romania, and gave Romania control of Transnistria, with Odessa as its capital; in the fall of 1941, the mass murder of Jews began and continued until 1944. Approximately 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews died, and more than 800,000 were displaced to the east. In Kiev's Babyn Yar, nearly 34,000 people were killed in a two-day massacre; from early 1942, in Volhynia and later in Galicia, on October 14, 1942, the OUN-B was joined by the Ukrainian Insurgents (UPA: Ukrainska Povstanska (Armiia), a nationalist partisan unit formed by the OUN-B, which pledged to cooperate closely with the Germans.

　After the victory over the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad in early 1943, the Soviets launched a counteroffensive to the west; in mid-1943, the Germans began a slow retreat from Ukraine, leaving behind massive destruction; in spring 1944, the Red Army began its advance into Galicia, and by late October, all of Ukraine was again under Soviet control. The human and material losses suffered by Ukraine during World War II were enormous. In 1945, Ukraine joined the United Nations.