Spotlight: Experiencing horrors of war -- stories of Ukrainian WWII veterans who fought against Japanese

The anniversary of China's victory in the war against Japanese aggression is a very special day for Vasyli Petrenko, a Ukrainian veteran, who fought against the Japanese twice, in 1939 and in 1945.

Petrenko, who was a 30-year-old tankman in the Transbaikal Front of the Soviet Army, still vividly remembers the moment when he learned that Japan had finally surrendered.

"It was a great relief and it was the best moment in my life," Petrenko, who now lives in Mykolaiv city in southern Ukraine, told Xinhua.

Petrenko, who celebrated his 100th birthday in March, was only 24 years old when he first went to war with the Japanese.

"In 1939, I served as a tankman in a military unit in Kiev and our unit was sent to Khalkhin Gol. True to say, we were a bit afraid to go there as we were young and inexperienced, but it was an order and we were obliged to perform it," the veteran said.

In the summer of 1939, Soviet forces defeated an incursion by Japanese troops near Khalkhin Gol River, Chinese territory at the time.

In 1941, Petrenko returned to Ukraine to fight Nazi Germany, but four years later he found himself again in fighting with the Japanese in Northeast China.

"After we liberated Czechoslovakia, we were given a new task and this time we were ready for it," the centenarian said.

He said those battles were the bloodiest he had ever experienced and that it is still not easy for him to talk about the battles seven decades later.

"I often think about war, but I do not like talking about it. I cannot bear to remember how my friends died in front of me and I could do nothing to help them," Petrenko said.

Petrenko was awarded with 22 medals and orders by the Soviet leadership. In particular, in late-August of the 1945, he got a letter of appreciation personally from the Soviet leader Josef Stalin for participating in the operation on Greater Khingan Range and for the contribution to the defeat of the Japanese imperialists.

Although the Ukrainian veteran highly values his awards, he stressed that all the honors mean nothing compared with the millions of lives that were lost in the war.

"The greatest treasure of humanity is peaceful sky over the head, and we should always remember this," Petrenko said.

As time passes, more and more WWII veterans die. But their memories are passed on to their children and later generations.

Alexey Krasny, a Soviet Army soldier who helped liberate China's Northeastern city of Harbin in 1945, died 15 years ago. But his son Nikolay still remembers his father's stories.

"The war against the Japanese invaders was the only war in which my father participated. He was very young when WWII in Europe started, and he was not taken to the front, even though he really wanted to," Nikolay Krasny told Xinhua.

"But when he was a 19-year-old, he volunteered to the Soviet Army to go to the eastern front, although he had no military experience," Krasny said.

His father talked a lot about the war and his stories were full of sadness and anger about Japanese cruelty.

"He was very impressed with Japanese brazen disregard to the human life, including their own life. My father told me that some Japanese taken prisoners performed hara-kiri suicides in front of other people. It was on the wrong side of common sense, it was insane," Krasny said.

His father also recalled the spine-chilling Japanese atrocities against foreign soldiers.

"Once, when my father and his comrades were crossing a mountain gorge, the Japanese had encircled the gorge and inflated it with unknown gas. The Soviet soldiers were trapped in the gorge full of poisoned substance and many of them died," Krasny said.

After the war, Krasny's father went back to his small village in northern Ukraine and lived happily as an easy-going and kind person. But he became very angry every time when somebody talked about the Japanese aggression against China.

"The Japanese army killed a lot of his friends, so my father abominated them. He was very proud of his medal for 'The Victory Over Japan' and was wearing it on the left side of the chest -- near the heart," Krasny said.

In the meantime, the son of the veteran pointed that the people of China left the best impression in the memory of his father, who always told his friends about the hardworking culture of Chinese people and the beauty of Chinese cities.

"My father admired Harbin as the most beautiful and richest city he had ever seen. He was impressed with the scale of development of Harbin. There were no such city in the Soviet Union at that time," Krasny said. Endi