2 Hryvni World War II

Issued to mark the 55th anniversary of Victory in World War II, this coin appeared during a period when Ukraine was actively constructing a post-Soviet national memory — one that had to reconcile the enormous Soviet sacrifices of the war with a distinctly Ukrainian identity separate from Russian commemoration. An estimated eight million Ukrainians died between 1941 and 1945, a figure that includes both military losses and civilian deaths under German occupation. The Zahreba reference places this firmly within the commemorative bimetallic series the National Bank launched through the late 1990s and early 2000s to populate a catalog that barely existed before independence in 1991.