May - June 2026
Vitalina Voitenko is a PhD student in History at the Faculty of Humanities of the National University of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (NaUKMA), where she has been studying since 2025. Since 2023, she has been working in the Education Department of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine during the Second World War.
In 2024, Vitalina Voitenko completed her Master’s degree in History at the National University of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy with a thesis on ‘Historians and Nazi Rule in Kyiv: Models of Behaviour’. Before commencing her history studies, she obtained a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Ecology at the Institute of Biology and Medicine of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, where she studied from 2014 to 2021.
My dissertation explores the role of Soviet Ukrainian correspondents at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (1945–1946) in shaping post-war Soviet Ukrainian narratives. Two key figures of my research — Yaroslav Halan and Yurii Yanovskyi, writers and publicists affiliated with the newspapers Radianska Ukraina (Soviet Ukraine) and Pravda Ukrainy (The Truth of Ukraine), worked as members of the Soviet delegation during the Tribunal. Despite their short stay at the trial as correspondents (Halan from November 1945 to April 1946, Yanovskyi from November 1945 to March 1946), they created a collection of reports from Nuremberg that combined ideological objectives with individual authorial voices. While describing the court proceedings they attended regularly, the writers went far beyond the courtroom. In their records they implemented own themes and agenda, constantly emphasizing the “Ukrainian dimension” of the war, reflected in their reporting on the collaboration between Ukrainians and Nazis, fate of the Jewish population and the Holocaust, future of the displaced persons in Germany, idea of unconditional justice and post-war relations on the eve of the Cold War.
The aim of my research is to study how Soviet Ukrainian writers, during the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, formed and transformed post-war narratives for the readers of Soviet Ukraine and to identify the circumstances, ideas and legacies that influenced them. This research will not only fill gaps in the study of writers’ work (still very underexplored), but also complement the study of judicial processes of the post-war period in terms of Soviet vision of “imperialism”, “judgement”, “peace”, and more.