75th anniversary of Holodomor marked

LeighT wrote:

folks, the precise reason that large members of the Ukrainian diaspora have supportesd conservative governments is because there has been a reactionary knee-jerk response from soviet-era revisionists....

Most people know the soviet version of the story very well, in fact after decades of complete silence and repression of other voices, it's frankly all i've heard in activist circles. Many Canadians of Ukrainian descent have been extremely active in fighting causes of the left, which is why the continued opposition to recognizing an obscene injustice to Ukrainians is such a slap in the face. It's enought to turn die-hard activists into right-wingers. which is exactly what has happened in the past, and will continue if leftists don't open their eyes.

This is nonsense.

The reason that large numbers of the Ukrainian diaspora have supported conservative governments is the same reason that large numbers of the Hungarian, Czech, Polish, and other eastern european diasporas have supported conservative governments: they are refugees from Stalinism (and their descendants) who have swallowed the capitalist kool-aid as an antidote to the life they escaped back home.

Canadians of Ukrainian descent who have been extremely active in fighting causes of the left are almost entirely descendants of the first wave of Ukrainian immigration, which provided the early Canadian Communist Party with a large portion of its membership. Of course, they were imbued with the corrupt ideology of Stalinism, and many of them eventually turned away from the CP when Stalin's crimes were officially acknowledged, but very few of them actually went over to the right wing - and certainly not over the issue of the famine.

Most people do [b]NOT[/b] know the soviet version of the Ukraine famine - even among "activist circles". I don't know what activist circles you have been moving in, Leigh, but they certainly aren't the same ones I have been in for the last forty years.

Love and best wishes, etc.

And there we have it, Leigh suggesting the left in Canada is looking for a resurgence in the Communist Party. Amazing really, and it makes me believe that little time has been spent by Leigh with activists on the left. Whether that is the case or not is unknown, but I suggest that she stop broadbrushing, again, the left in Canada.

Moreover, this comment "activists of the left continue with soviet-era revisionism, or align themselves with current Russian oligarchs." is beyond my comprehension. I have been an activist for my entire life and I have never once heard any of whom I associated with even discuss Russia and/or the Ukraine famine, In fact, it was not until I came to babble, 4 years ago, where I saw any discussion at all of it, and even then it was/is a small contingent, speaking more generally of Russia. Though admittedly, I do not follow those threads closely, if at all.

And IMV, if Ukrainian activists find more common ground in the world with the CON servatives, because some on the left see it is as crimes against humanity, and not Genocide, (though of course some may also believe it was) then I would suggest there is no current possibility for any common ground with much of the left activists that I know anyway. As I stated above it would seem then, to me at least, that Ukrainian activists pretty much have 1 sole focus, furthering the position of the Ukraine, and/or fostering Ukrainian nationalism.

My beloved next door neighbours for many years were Hungarian  diaspora, who experienced the same grave human rights tragedy, under the Soviets, that was found in the Ukraine, and they had to flee for their lives and leave everything behind too. However, there was no way in hell anyone in that family would have supported the Conservatives/Liberals, as they fully recognized a potential for a fascist state under those auspices. They were against both fascism and communism, full stop.

So again I ask, what is it that you want the activists on the left to help you with Leigh? As our approval, or disapproval, of whether or not the famine was genocide should actually mean very little in the scheme of things, unless one is working towards an agenda.

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"watching the tide roll away"

LeighT wrote:

remind- I was responding in that last post to M.Spector's comment, in which he appeared to be lamenting the fact that the Communist Party of Canada was reduced in membership because of the facts about Stalin's behaviour. 

Huh? Not that I am standing up for mspector or anything, as I am not, but to me mspectors words said nothing of the sort.

 

Quote:

I know there is diversity on the left on this issue, Jack Layton and many New Democrats supported a bill that passed in Parliament last spring which commemorated the Holodomor as an act of genocide.   This was good.

Point?

Quote:

I'm just curious why it's so difficult for some babblers to get their heads around the idea, and it's not the first time I've encountered leftists in Canada who are staunchly aligned with Russia come hell or high water.  If you or any others can shed some light on these dynamics, please do.

Give me a freakin break! There may be1 or 2 posters here who are aligned with "communist" thought, but to call leftists staunchly aligned with Russia come hell or high water is false dichotomy, and I see it as an attempt to create a conceptual framework that is not a reality.

Again I ask what your purpose is?

 

 

[/quote]
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"watching the tide roll away"

LeighT wrote:

I was responding in that last post to M.Spector's comment, in which he appeared to be lamenting the fact that the Communist Party of Canada was reduced in membership because of the facts about Stalin's behaviour.

I wasn't "lamenting" it. I merely referred to it.

I would have been happy if the CP had disappeared completely (which in fact it almost has).

The Holodomor-recognition campaign is part of a larger anti-communist campaign, promoted by right-wing ideologues. One doesn't have to accept the official Soviet position (whatever that is - and where do you find it, anyway?) in order to understand that this is being used as a club to bash the left and to equate socialism with fascism.

If the NDP has jumped on the bandwagon, it's completely in keeping with their tradition of rabid anti-communism and their political perspective of reforming capitalism rather than replacing it. It wouldn't be the first time the NDP's foreign policy gave aid and comfort to right-wing movements (e.g. siding with Israel against Palestinians).

Trying to blackmail the left into supporting the campaign ("left-wing Ukrainian-Canadians will vote Conservative if you don't") is unlikely to succeed as a strategy.

ok Michelle, appreciate the note, guess I'm just trying to sign off on this conversation because it's been going on too long for me!

M. Spector- the initial post on this thread by WinnipegGirl noted commemoration of the Holodomor genocide.  The first comment on the thread flipped the genocide commemoration into a political issue.  This unfortunately has been the kind of process for most of the 75 years since the Holodomor.  If anything, I can understand why those who experienced it moved away from leftist circles, and as I've had some similar experiences myself, am suggesting that the left would probably find it useful not to continue the practice.  no strategies and agendas, just probably tired of the dynamic.  I'm glad the NDP moved to recognize the Holodomor. 

 

LeighT wrote:

If anything, I can understand why those who experienced it moved away from leftist circles, and as I've had some similar experiences myself, am suggesting that the left would probably find it useful not to continue the practice.  no strategies and agendas, just probably tired of the dynamic.  I'm glad the NDP moved to recognize the Holodomor.

Alex seconded the motion, as such the NDP did not just move to recognize it, they were part and parcel of it being brought forward for adoption. Moreover, Peggy Nash worked closely with  Canadian Ukrainians in respect to CHRP, and trying to force Harper to acknowlege previous transgressions by the Canadian government. So I am seriously not sure why you, and apparently other Ukrainian Canadians, are so disparaging of activists on the left, and moved as a block vote to support a Harper government. And are now currently trying to be dismissive of left activists.

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"watching the tide roll away"

LeighT wrote:

  I don't think it needs to be polarized, and the end result COULD be a substantial shift in politics in this country, but certainly not if activists of the left continue with soviet-era revisionism, or align themselves with current Russian oligarchs.  . .

 These regions were visited not simply with famine, but with militarized slaughter, rape, and torture on a vast scale.   

Most people know the soviet version of the story very well, in fact after decades of complete silence and repression of other voices, it's frankly all i've heard in activist circles.

And some number of the diaspora post-WWII weren't ordinary anticommunists. Some of them freely chose to collaborate with the Nazis over and above what was necessary to survive. Thousands came from the Baltic countries and Ukraine as well as Germany. Most of the war criminals lived out the rest of their lives under protection of Canadian, British and U.S. law and collected international pensions living under their real names.

But this thread is supposed to be about commemorating an unnecessary and unfortunate famine not scoring our favourite political points with selective history.

 

LeighT wrote:

Ukrainian Canadians have been interned here during the first world war, penned up in barbed wire cages, women and children included, because of the political fears of Canadians.

Ukrainian Canadian organizations are sharply divided along political lines. The ones on the right talk about the internment of Ukrainians during WW I (which was atrocious) but never about the internment of Ukrainians in WW II. [url=http://www.infoukes.com/history/internment/][u]This website,[/u][/url] for example, doesn't even acknowledge it.

I started a thread on the "old" babble about the internment of Canadian communists in WW II but it has not been preserved and may possibly be lost forever. The majority of the communists imprisoned under the War Measures Act at Kananaskis, Alta. were Ukrainians, including [url=http://www.socialisthistory.com/Docs/CPC/WW2/IWC13.htm]"the leaders of the Ukrainian labour-farmer organizations and the editors of "The People's Gazette" and "Farmer's Life".[/url] Like their WW I counterparts, they were interned because of the political fears of Canadians, but they are forgotten (quite intentionally) by the right-wing of the Ukrainian Canadian diaspora.

My point of course is that each side has their own history to tell. Berating leftists because they don't sign on to the "history agenda" of the right wing is pointless.

Fidel, who do you think was in charge in Ukraine during the Holocaust? 

 Leigh, I am fully aware of the internment of close to 5000 Ukrainians from 1914-1920, did I just not mention Peggy Nash's work on CHRP, for Ukrainian Canadians, and Harper's refual to committ to anything?!

And Iwould ask how you feel about Kostash"s work All of Baba’s Children (and her subsequent one All of Baba's Great Grandchildren from 2000) Bloodlines and The Next Canada. In Search of Our Future Nation?

Because it seems to me what you are expressing is deeply divergent from the principles and thinking that Kostash, as a Ukrainian feminist  illuminates. Hence my FN's questioning. But perhaps I am seeing "otherness" or the attempted creation of it, where none exists in any great/significant strength anymore. Though I understand as Kostash put it "there’s no getting around the psychological insecurity of a community that has
periodically lived under a cloud in Canada as ‘enemy aliens’." However, it is my perception, perhaps a wrong one, is that this former ideology of "enemy aliens" has not been current for a long time. 

In fact, these other words of hers, blew me away, when I first read them and indeed continually still do:

 “In spite of the deep cultural wounds, the shocking
dispersal of historical materials, the failing languages and the traumatized
body of the Indian, First Nations can still imagine the Euro-Canadians, among
others, as collaborators in a kind of cultural ‘bilingualism’, that, in a series
of translation back and forth between cultures, will be transformative of all
our relationships to the homeplace.

For all of us who have rooted our memory and point of origin
in offshore cultures or fantasies of self-generated New World identity, the
invitation to consider ourselves citizens of an ancient ‘island’ is provocative.
Especially when the message is passed on by those who have here since time
immemorial.

It is, in fact, the ‘sneak-up dance’ of the ones for whom it
is the only motherland.”

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"watching the tide roll away"

Actually it was November and it was elements of Hoepner's 4th Panzer Group, (which was not an SS "Nazi" unit) that alledgedly saw the Kremlin spires, after pushing back Rokossovsky's 16th Army and crossing the Moscow Volga Canal. Hoepner was also not much of a Nazi and was indeed shot after the 1944 April plot to kill Hitler.

The validity of the claim that the Kremlin was in sight, is debatable, and indeed people have tried to look for this spot where you can see the Kremlin Spires from 35 km away, and are hard pressed to show that it is possible. Light bouncing of the snow and into a lens of a pair of binoculars?

Your conjecture that Roosevelt and Churchill were expecting the imminent fall of the Russia capital, is likely correct. Most people were of this belief in fact, including Stalin and the NKVD who were busily shooting the political prisoners who they were unable to transport east.

You mean the anti-communist, pro-British, Serbian army officer and leader of the anti-communist Chetnik movement who was arrested by Comrade Tito? That Mihailovich?

In anycase the Yugoslav partisans and Chetniks did not disrupt supply to the Wermacht in Russia, you are deeply confused. That is very far away from the German supply line to Russia, which ran through Poland, not the Balkans. 

The problem for the Germans was that the invasion of Yugoslavia, in order to back up Mussolini's floundering campaign in Greece, meant that the German army had to march all the way down to the Agean, kick the British out, and then march all the way back to the start line on the Russian border. If anything it was Mussolini who caused the delay.

No. As your links states, the Yugoslav army collapsed almost immeditaly.

The reason Germany invaded Yugoslavia, was to help Mussolini in his invasion of Greece, which he did not even bother telling Hitler about, saying: "he always hands me fait accompli's, so I will give him one." The Greek army gave strong resistance to the Italians invading from Albania (invaded by Italy in march 1938) and because the British quickly intervened on the Greek side, the Italians were unable to handle the issue on their own. The Germans demanded that Yugoslavia allow the Wermacht access to Yugoslavia, in what the Yugoslavs understood to be a de facto occupation, and balked after intitially agreeing.

The British inspired a coup, and Germany invaded. They swept aside the Yugoslavian army, and then crushed the Greeks and British in a matter of weeks. The issue was basically how fast the Germans could drive through the Balkans. No serious partisan or Chetnik activity occurred in Yugoslavia, until the they had sufficiently organized themselves, and this occurred around the same time as Germany invaded Russia in June.

If anyone "saved Russia" it was the Greeks, and Mussolini's hubris. 

It is true that the Germans had to maintain several divisions in Yugoslavia, but this was only really necessary as the war drew on.

Cueball wrote:

No. As your links states, the Yugoslav army collapsed almost immeditaly.

Yes, and according to a Time Magazine article of 1942, Montenegrin partisans later accused Mihailovich and at least one of his underlings of cooperating with axis forces. Strange.

Quote:

"They emerged like cats from everywhere, knives between their teeth. Flares did not frighten them. They broke into our right flank. Then the terrible thing happened that froze the blood of all of us. ... Men, women and children flung themselves into the attack."

Thus wrote a German war correspondent. He was not describing Allied Commandos, or even Russian guerrillas. He was talking about Yugoslavia's Partisans, who, he added, "are not wild hordes, but strictly organized units which print their own newspapers in the forests and manufacture their own bombs and munitions."

The Germans wanted to transport oil and other supplies from Balkan nations through Yugoslavia. Oil and gasoline were vital to the mechanized units. As I was saying earlier, the Germans were running low on the precious juice even early on. By end of the war, many German soldiers were running supplies into on horseback, and on horseback they retreated. That is, those of General Paulus' sixth army et al who survived or avoided the infernal cauldron.

Quote:

The Balkans. Following the unexpected quick victory over France, Hitler turned east to the Balkans, a critical area for food and oil supplies. Penetration of this area would enable him to use overland transportation of these goods to help Germany withstand the effects of the British blockade of its shipping. Hitler moved first against Romania; in June 1940 the Soviets, who coveted Romania's substantial oil resources, had seized Bessarabia and northern Bucovina.

Hitler also coveted Balkan oil supplies and had designs on Iran eventually. The Germans wanted to be in or around Moscow at least five weeks earlier than the beginning of late November-first week of December. Russian winters were proven hurdles to the best laid plans of would-be Corsican-French and German conquerors alike.

Hitler didn't want to invade Yugoslavia, which was a friendly neutral country, and only did it because Mussollini had opened up the Pandoras box in Greece. The Germans did not want to fight a two front war. When Yugoslavia refused to co-operate in this plan, the Germans felt it was necessary to invade. This is what caused the delay.

You think the Wermacht could both drive down to Athens, and invade Russia at the same time? No. I am sorry, it take time to move these armies around. They don't just teleport from Austria to Athens and then from Athens to Poland.  

The fact that it only took 5 weeks for the army to drive to Athens and then be back in time for a summer invasion of Russia shows conclusively that the resistance was nominal. It took as long for the Germans to occupy all of Poland, and even longer for them to defeat France.

Name one major Chetnik or Partisan action that predates July 1941? You wont find any because the Partisans and the Chetnik's were organizing in the hills, not fighting pitched battles against the Wermacht. 

Sorry the partisans had nothing to do with delaying the invasion of the USSR. The invasion of the Balkans, itself, was what delayed the invasion of Russia. The Yugoslav resistance had a marginal effect on the course of the war, and certainly had an important effect on the shape of post war Europe, but nothing to do with timing of Barbarossa.

Barbarossa was delayed because Hitler decided to invade Yugoslavia in order to conclude the Italian campaign in Greece. End of story.

You have no idea what you are talking about. What you are talking about happened in 1942/43.

In march 1941 Germany invaded Yugoslavia and crushed the Yugoslav army. A that time the remnants of that army retreated to the hills and began organizing resistance. The German army swept through Yugoslavia, and Greece then headed off to Russia. The German invasion of Yugoslavia was a walkover.

Any delay caused by the invasion was the result of the German decision to invade, the resistance of the Yugolsav regular army units, the Greek army and their British alllies, which was not much of an account all things told, and definitely not the Yugoslave guerrilla formations which did not even become operational, really, until well after Barbarossa was underway.

The Germans were a month late for the planned invasion of Russia, and invaded in late June. Guerrilla operations began in Yugoslavia after the main force of the Germany army left to go fight the Russians. With the German army was busy elsewhere, guerrilla attacks began in ernest against the forces the Germans left to garrison Yugoslavia.

Quote:

The most important guerrilla operation in 1941 took place against the Italians in Montenegro. Ruggedly independent, the Montenegrins on 13 July swarmed down in well-coordinated attacks on the Italian garrisons scattered throughout their mountain state. Taken by surprise, the occupation forces were destroyed or thrown back on their major garrison towns and communications centers. Returning with strong ground, naval, and air forces, the Italians required almost a year to put down the rising, and managed to accomplish it only by enlisting the aid of the Chetniks. Stipulations in the agreement with local Chetnik leaders required the Italians to restrict themselves to the garrison towns and main communication and transportation lines. In turn, the Chetniks maintained control over the countryside and kept it free of Partisans, drawing on Italian stocks for arms and ammunition.

[SNIP]

Guerrilla activities against the Germans in Yugoslavia commenced shortly after the cessation of formal hostilities. However, in the beginning, open resistance to the German forces was on a smaller scale than in the Italian-occupied areas, and the guerrillas conducted themselves more cautiously. With the departure, by late June 1941, of the bulk of the combat troops for Operation BARBAROSSA, the WB Southeast reported an increasing number of sabotage incidents. Road and railroad bridges were blown; telephone and telegraph lines were cut; trains derailed; German military vehicles, traveling either alone or in convoy, fired on or destroyed; and isolated detachments guarding industrial and military installations attacked. During July and August there were also daily attacks on Serbian police posts to obtain weapons and on villages to obtain food. Standing crops were burned, banks robbed, and a general state of uncertainty and unrest created.

The actual facts can be found here: German Antiguerrilla Operations in the Balkans (1941-1944)

Your summary is a tendentious, romantic and a-historical rendering of the facts.  

I know you fail to see the signifigance. The significance is that this action is the first real activity of the Yugoslave resistance and it happens one month after Germany invades Russia. In other words the Yugoslav resitance could have had no possible impact on the timing of Barbarossa because there was no Yugoslav resistance until after the invasion of Russia began.

And you appreciation of my feelings about Churchill are as flawed as your assessment of the impact of the Yugoslav guerilla movement on the timing of Barbarossa.

Cueball wrote:

I am pointing out that the delay was caused by German and Italian strategic decisions and the resistance of the national armies of Greece and Yugoslavia, not the Chetniks and Partisans, as you stated.

The Italians played no part in the decision to begin barbarossa.

The national Yugoslav army was defeated in about twelve days. The Yugoslav upper command fled the country. 

The Germans were in full control of Greece by the end of April.

You and der fuhrer now have between end of April and June 22 to invade Russia.  

The Germans needed to secure an oil/fuel supply line from Romania through Yugoslavia. The Panzers and GM trucks wouldnt run on gummy bears, believe it or no.

The German occupied the Romanian oil fields in late 1940. The highway to Moscow from Romania does not run through Yugoslavia. Supply to Germany proper goes through Hungary (an Axis ally) and German occupied Poland. Go look at a map.

Any transport of oil that might have gone through Yugoslavia was guaranteed by the Axis friendly government in Belgrade, which had strong trading relations with Germany, something the Herr Ribbentrop secured in the run up to the war.

The relationship with Yugoslavia only becam a problem when the Germans decided that they needed military access through Yugoslavia, in order to support the flagging Italian campaign in Greece, in 1941. Yugoslavia joined the Axis on March 25th, 1941, but there was a coup against the government, engineered by the British.

Germany invaded.

Had Italy won the war in Greece, there would have been no invasion of Yugoslavia, and Barbarossa would have started on schedule.

Can you provide a link to German counter-insurgency warfare report?

 

Sounds interesting

Yes, Mihailovich's chetniks were attacking German supply convoys before June 22, 1941, which preceded the month of July and skirmish with the Italians in Montenegro.  I'm still not sure why you believe events in July had any influence on Hitler's decision to attack Russia several weeks earlier in June. But I suppose now youve at least acknowldged that oil and fuel were of paramount importance to the corporate sponsored war machine running on oil and not fresh air. It's sometimes difficult to keep up with how little you understand of the overall picture.     

Fidel wrote:

Yes, Mihailovich's chetniks were attacking German supply convoys before June 22, 1941, which preceded the month of July and skirmish with the Italians in Montenegro.      

Evidence please.

All but a very tiny garrison was left in Yugoslavia after the intitial invasion. The Wermacht left. The Partisans used this opportunity to start attacking the occupation forces, and those forces were not reinforced until September.

Quote:

At the time hostilities ended in April, Twelfth f Army had under its control four corps headquarters and a total of twelve divisions, four of them armored. By 22 June, when Operation BARBAROSSA began, three of the corps headquarters, all the armored divisions, and all but 2 mountain and 1 infantry divisions had been redeployed. This redistribution of forces left Twelfth Army with the XVIII Mountain Corps, with headquarters near Athens, to which were attacked the 5th and 6th mountain Divisions, on Crete and near Athens, respectively; the 164th Infantry Division, in Salonika and on the Aegean Islands; and the 125th Infantry Regiment (Separate), in Salonika.

The gap created by the departed units was filled partially by the recently created LXV Corps Command, an area, rather than a tactical, headquarters stationed in Belgrade. To this headquarters were attached the 704th, 714th, and 717th Infantry Divisions, spread over Serbia proper, and the 718th Infantry Division, stationed in the German zone of interest in Croatia, with headquarters at Banja Luka. In contrast to the troops they replaced, more than one-half f of the personnel of these divisions, particularly the platoon leaders and noncommissioned officers, were over age for infantry service. The combat experience of most of the company and higher commanders was limited to World War I, and the divisions lacked their full complement of motor vehicles and logistical services. Training had been interrupted by the assignment to occupation duty to the extent one division had only completed battalion exercises.

German strength in the Balkans remained at approximately this level until mid-September 1941, the only change being in mid-August, when the 6th Mountain Division left. The 713th Infantry Division of the same type as the divisions attached to the LXV Corps Command, moved into the Balkans shortly before the departure of the mountain division.

Sum total of German divisions in the Yugoslavia when Operation Barbarossa began: 3 front line divisions and 4 supplementary divisions staffed with WW1 vetrans, without proper equipment.

Sum total of German divisions on the Russian front on June 22nd: 120. 

Also, the Chetniks, did not operate in Romania, or Hungary, or anywhere near the supply line for the transport of Romanian oil to the Russian front, so oil has absolutely nothing to do with this at all.

Your source is Churchill. I rest my case. 

There is no reason to take your word for it, since I have read ample material on this subject, some of which I have provided here that directly contradicts your thesis. You have simply confused Churchill's shaggy dog stories about how it was his intervention in Yugoslavia and Greece that delayed the Wermacht attack on Russia, and are attributing it to Chetnik guerrillas, instead of Churchill.

The reason he did this was to excuse the terrible loss of British soldiers who died in the Greek campaign, a decision he took. However, had Mussolini not invaded Greece, and the Germans not invaded Yugoslvia to support Italy, then there would have been no Chetnik movement, because Yugoslavia would have remained an Axis friendly neutral. 

Any child could look at a map and see that there is no way Chetnik and Partisans operating in Yugoslavia could interdict oil supplies from Romania to the Russian front, since Yugoslavia is to the west of Romania, not to the North or East.

But even the truth of the shape of the world is amendable to the purposes of an ideological monkey.

There are no quotes from Von Paulus in your Serb Nationalist fanboy site, there is only a summary of things they are reported to have said. There is the quote from Churchill claiming that it was his man in Yugoslavia that saved Russia.

From your own other source:

Quote:

Hitler moved the date for Barbarossa back to 22 June from 15 May because of "[t]he German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece during April and May, 1941…also caused a series of delays in the attack on Russia itself."[42] At the time, it likely seemed the sensible thing for Germany to do; but by December, with their armies poised to finish off Russia and take Moscow, it can be seen as a key contributor to Nazi defeat. This delay of five weeks would prove to be crucial! Had Barbarossa started in May instead of June, they would have arrived in Moscow and Leningrad sooner and would have taken both cities. This was yet another in a long line of German errors and miscalculations that contributed to their defeat against the Russians in the war; but logistics might have been the key area that really broke the Nazis back.

-- Mike Ruzza

 It says nothing about your fantasy partisans waylaying supply convoys from Romania to Poland, because Germans being as stupid as they are can't figure out that the shortest line between two points is a line, and instead drove to Sarejavo from Romania and then to Warsaw, instead of directly there.

It says nothing about Chetniks delaying the invasion of Russia. What it says is that the German decision to invade Yugoslavia might have "seemed sensible at the time" but caused a 5 week delay. Do you understand this?

The 5 weeks that it took to knock out the national armies of Greece and Yugoslavia and their British Allies, is the time that was lost.