Leading British historian Antony Beevor has described a Ukrainian ban on his award-winning book Stalingrad as “utterly outrageous”.

The bestselling history, winner of the 1999 Samuel Johnson prize, tells of the battle for the Russian city during the second world war. A Russian translation was one of 25 titles included on a banned list issued by Ukrainian authorities last week, alongside books by authors including Boris Akunin and Boris Sokolov.

In 2016, Ukraine passed a law that banned books imported from Russia if they contained “anti-Ukrainian” content, with an “expert council” assessing titles for such content. It is almost four years since Russian president Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, during which time around 10,000 people have died, and more than 1.7m have been displaced.

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Serhiy Oliyinyk, head of the Ukrainian Committee for State TV and Radio Broadcasting’s licensing and distribution control department, told Radio Free Europe (RFE) that the ban was imposed because of a passage that details how 90 Jewish children were shot by Ukrainian militia “to save the feelings of the Sonderkommando”, the work units made up of the Nazis’ death camp prisoners.

“It’s a provocation,” he told RFE. “When we checked the sources he used, we found out he used reports of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. It was enough to discuss the issue at expert council and we are happy they supported us.”

But Beevor said the source was not an internal Soviet document, but a book by the anti-Nazi German officer Helmuth Groscurth. The book is noted as a source in Stalingrad, and the quotes attributed to Groscurth are sourced to it. Beevor also pointed to a harrowing but corroborating description of the incident in the the 1988 collection of firsthand recollections The Good Old Days: The Holocaust As Seen By Its Perpetrators and Bystanders.

“It’s utterly outrageous. They have no reason for doing it. It’s quite clear both in the Russian edition and English edition what the source was and where it came from – this rather brave and religious officer [Groscurth] who protested strongly, despite threats he would be reported to Himmler … about this massacre of the children. There’s no way the Soviets would even have known about it,” said Beevor.

Beevor has written to the British embassy in Kiev about the ban, which he intends to protest. In the letter, Beevor says Oliyinyk’s “statement implying that I repeated anti-Ukrainian propaganda from Russian sources is totally untrue” and explains how he sourced the incident from the account in Groscurth’s Tagebücher eines Abwehroffiziers, published in Stuttgart in 1970.

“Groscurth was so shocked by what he had discovered that he wrote to his wife: ‘We cannot and should not be allowed to win this war’,” writes Beevor. “I am demanding an immediate apology from Oliyinyk and a reversal of the decision to impound the book by the ‘expert council’.”

Halya Coynash from the Kharkiv Human Rights Group described the ban as baffling. On the group’s website, she wrote: “One might suspect the reports were fake news aimed at discrediting Ukraine had the announcement not been posted on the committee’s official website.”

Ukrainian translator Steve Komarnyckyj said that the Russian translation of the book showed “significant differences” to Beevor’s English. “The original English text refers to ‘two police battalions’ having participated in the massacre at Babi Yar but the translation refers to ‘two battalions of Ukrainian nationalists’,” he said, noting a second instance where a reference to Ukrainian militia was to changed to “nationalists”. “The publisher needs to revise the translation so that these words are rendered into Russian more precisely, and a thorough proofreading of the translation against the original is required. The possibly mistaken impression could be created that the text was manipulated with political intent. The publisher may wish to explain how these variations arose or attempt to justify them in order to dispel any possible misunderstanding.”

Beevor said the ban is “pretty depressing from point of view of Ukraine itself – they want to show themselves as being so much more democratic than Russians to the north and then they’re doing this”.

But he said that the topic was “very close to the bone” for the Ukrainians. “Of course, during the second world war, many Ukrainians who suffered desperately during the famines … were thoroughly anti-Soviet and that’s why so many of them welcomed the Germans when they arrived and even volunteered to serve with the Germans. That’s still desperately embarrassing for Ukrainian nationalism today. So this is one reason obviously why they are so sensitive and raw-nerved about the whole thing,” he said.