translation: Koniev, despite his rough, outspoken manner, was generally regarded by the military as the more thoughtful and better educated of the two. A voracious reader, he kept a small library at his headquarters and occasionally surprised his staff by quoting passages from Turgenev and Pushkin. The rank and file of his armies knew him as a stern disciplinarian. But unlike Zhukov, he was considerate of his officers, reserving his wrath for the enemy. On the battlefield he could be barbarous. During one phase of the Dnieper campaign, after his troops had surrounded several German divisions, Koniev demanded their immediate surrender. When the Germans refused he ordered his saber-wielding Cossacks to attack. " We let the Cossacks cut for as long as they wished, " he told Milovan Djilas, head of the Yugoslav Military Mission to Moscow, in 1944. " They even hacked off the hands of those who raised them to surrender. " In this respect at least, Zhukov and Koniev saw eye to eye: they could not forgive Nazi atrocities. For Germans, they had neither mercy nor remorse.
translation: Nhưng không như Zhukov, ông khá chừng mực với các sĩ quan, và dành cơn thịnh nộ cho kẻ thù. Trên chiến trường, ông có thể rất dã man. Trong một giai đoạn của chiến dịch Dnieper, sau khi quân của ông đã bao vây mấy sư đoàn Đức, Koniev yêu cầu bọn họ đầu hàng ngay lập tức. Khi quân Đức từ chối, ông ra lệnh cho quân Cossack cầm kiếm nhẹ tấn công. Ông nói với Milovan Djilas, trưởng Phái bộ Quân sự Nam Tư tại Moscow vào năm 1944 rằng, " Chúng tôi để quân Cossack chém thỏa thích. Thậm chí họ còn cắt cụt tay mấy kẻ giơ tay xin hàng. "