First, some large extracts from the original article on Zhukov, then the response:

The Man Who Really Defeated Hitler

By Shane Kenny, Irish Times, Dublin, Ireland, Sat, April 30, 2005

The new German film Downfall, depicting Hitler's final days in his Berlin bunker before he committed suicide 60 years ago today, has received wide international acclaim. In the film, desperate Wehrmacht officers want to contact the Russian Marshal Georgi Zhukov to negotiate surrender. This was the military leader who, more than any other in the second World War, became Hitler's nemesis.

...

Born into dire poverty in 1896, Zhukov was decorated twice in the tsarist army during the first World War. He became a soldiers' Soviet leader during the 1917 revolution and joined the Communist Party in 1919. He survived Stalin's great purge of the military in 1938, though he was a target of the debauched and murderous internal security chief Lavrenti Beria. When Hitler launched his attack on Russia on June 22nd, 1941, Zhukov, aged 45, had been chief of staff of the Red Army for just five months.

Stalin received more than 80 warnings of the impending Nazi invasion in 1941 but dismissed them as "disinformation" concocted by Churchill and others to embroil him in a war with Hitler. Zhukov wanted the Red Army be put on full alert, but Stalin refused. Finally, an ineffective, garbled warning was permitted on the evening before the invasion.

THE EASTERN FRONT was a cruel, bloody contest. It is not widely appreciated that Hitler's surprise attack on Russia was conceived as a war of extermination as well as territorial conquest. He intended the complete destruction of Leningrad and Moscow, with the annihilation of their civilian populations. The capital was to be flooded as an artificial lake, drowning men, women and children.

...

The major criticism of Zhukov is that he recklessly sacrificed his troops - but the eastern front was a battle against extermination, and Soviet military doctrine, unlike the West's, had not changed because of the slaughter of 1914-1918. The end, regardless of human cost, justified the means. Zhukov was ruthless towards panic-mongers and cowards, ordering the arrest and execution of officers, soldiers and commissars to illustrate where failure would lead. His defences at Leningrad saved the city, but more than a million people died from starvation, cold, bombing and shelling. Zhukov would return in January 1943 to break the blockade.

When Zhukov took over, British historian Prof Richard Overy estimates there were just 90,000 defenders left out of 800,000. Zhukov said: "I assumed command at a time when the front lines had actually reached the suburbs of Moscow." He asked for 200 tanks and reinforcements. There were no tanks and a shortage of ammunition - but reserves came from Siberia. In freezing temperatures, his counterattack, started in early December, threw the Wehrmacht back 130 miles from the city.

Zhukov had also mobilised every last civilian resource. "Everyone who was able to shoulder a rifle or hold a spade, or could work in one of the war plants came to the defence of Moscow," he said.

After this success, Stalin took direct command again, and, rejecting Zhukov's advice for another concentrated attack on the Germans before Moscow, he ordered a general offensive along the entire frontline. It was a disaster, and half a million men were lost.


...

[author describes how this became a pattern: Zhukov winning and Stalin bumbling]

...

He and "Ike" became friends. When Eisenhower visited Moscow in August 1945 at Zhukov's invitation, ecstatic crowds greeted them both. The same year, Eisenhower said "To no one man does the United Nations owe a greater debt than to Marshal Zhukov . . . one day . . . there is certain to be another Order of the Soviet Union. It will be the Order of Zhukov, and that order will be prized by every man who admires courage, vision, fortitude, and determination in a soldier." Ironically, this became true after the fall of communism.

...In 1946 he was arraigned before a kangaroo court of the central committee and accused of plotting a coup.

Turned into a "non-person", erased from history books and banished to military backwaters, he returned to power as minister for defence under Khrushchev after playing a central role in the arrest of Beria following Stalin's death. But Khrushchev too grew to fear Zhukov's popularity and sacked him from both government and the army in 1957.

***

Now the Response:

RE: ARTICLE ABOUT SOVIET MARSHAL GEORGIY ZHUKOV
Zhukov was one of the cruelest murderers of Ukrainians in history

LETTER TO THE EDITOR
From Kyrylo Bulkin, Kyiv, Ukraine
The Action Ukraine Report #482, Article 13
Washington, D.C., Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Dear Morgan,

I was disappointed with the article about Zhukov in the last issue of
"Ukraine Report". Maybe you did not know that Zhukov was one of the
cruelest murderers of Ukrainians in all of history. Particularly, he issued
the decree on exiling ALL Ukrainians to Siberia. Soviet executives started
to exercise that decree but some time later Stalin stopped it for unknown
reasons (some historians think that Ukrainian leaders persuaded Stalin to
stop it).

1944 June 22. Stalin's Secret document No. 078/42, over the signatures of
NKVD chief Beria, Marshal Zhukov and Federov proposes exile to Siberia
of "all Ukrainians who had lived under the German occupation". Since all
Ukraine was under German occupation this effectively meant every Ukrainian
could be exiled except those who had escaped to Russia in 1941.
Khrushchev in his Secret Speech condemned Stalin for this decree.
(http://www.infoukes.com/history/ww2/page-28.html)

The whole decree was published in the book of Russian writer Felix Chuev
"Soldaty Imperii (Soldiers of Empire)". - Moscow, "Kovcheg", 1998.

Here are some more quotations about Zhukov (I took them from the book
"Marshal Zhukov and Ukrainians in the WWII" by Levko Lukjanenko. - Kyiv,
"Kozaky", 2002) - sorry for imperfect translation, maybe you could edit it.

"At the beginning of 1939 G. Zhukov went to the Far East to defend the
Mongol border from the Japanese army. The group of Military Academy
listeners (the officers' reserve) have arrived from Moscow with him. Zhukov
fired those whom he considered not relevant to their positions and shot
them. On their positions he placed people from reserve and if the last made
the smallest fault, they, like their predecessors, got bullet in the back of
the head". (Encyclopedia of the Military Art. - Minsk: "Literatura", 1997,
p. 199)

"In the spring of 1944 during the Korsun'-Shevchenkovsky operation Zhukov
ordered the troops, which were recently made up of the men from 15 to 55
y.o., mostly from the surrounding Ukrainian villages, to take the well
trained German defense by storm. "Zagradotryady" (the barrage troops)
drove those Ukrainians on one attack after another, shooting in their backs.
During 24 days of that criminal blood-letting 770 thousands people were
killed, most of them Ukrainians".

"Most often troops, according to Zhukov's order, attacked enemy's
fortifications frontally, as it was, for example, during the capture of
Zeelov Hill.

Zhukov sent infantry through the mined fields, saving time instead of mine
clearing. And he was not ashamed of his own cruelty - moreover, he was
proud of it in the talk with allies; Eisenhower was shocked with it.

Even many years after it American general wrote in his memories with
indignation: "I can hardly imagine what could happen in our army with a
general who would dare to give such order". But we know exactly what
happened with Georgiy Zhukov: he got his third gold medal of Hero".
(Encyclopedia of the Military Art. - Minsk: "Literatura", 1997, pp. 208-209)

"Maybe in some years Marshal Zhukov overcame even Stalin considering
the amount of blood that he shed and death punishment that he exercised
himself. He is one of the most terrible persons in Russian history".
(Bushkov A. "Russia, that did not exist". -Moscow, 1997, p. 559)

Best regards,

Kyrylo Bulkin, Journalist, Kyiv, Ukraine, kbulkin@yahoo.com