President Petro Poroshenko has stressed that Ukrainians had made a significant contribution to the victory over Nazism in the Second World War.

"Marshals and generals, Ukrainians by birth, headed almost half of the fifteen fronts, among the Soviet generals of the Second World War - about three hundred Ukrainians. But, in my firm conviction, Nazism was defeated primarily by the Ukrainian soldier. A soldier, no matter what nation he was. A soldier who fought not for Stalin, but for his land, for his territory, for his family ... Without a million soldiers, Ukrainian soldiers on the margins of World War II, the world war would not have ended, most likely it would last much longer," he said during the ceremony of taking military oath by the new replenishment of the 101st separate guard brigade of the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Kyiv on Wednesday.

The president stressed that Ukraine, as a result of its geostrategic situation, had become one of the main bridgeheads of the World War. "Ding thirty-five months, active military operations of regular troops were conducted on its territory," he said.

He recalled that as a result of the enemy occupation millions of civilians lost their lives from bullets of punishers, cold and hunger.

"Bled white by the pre-war collectivization, the Holodomor, the Great Terror of the 1930s, our people lost every fifth daughter and son in the flame of the worldwide human disaster," Poroshenko said.

According to the president, the Nazis burned nearly one and a half thousand villages on Ukrainian soil, defiled Ukrainian shrines, destroyed hundreds of enterprises, educational and cultural institutions, and monuments of architecture.