KIEV, Ukraine — Since Russia began invading Ukraine last year, the Ukrainian government and NATO allies have posted and then quietly deleted three seemingly harmless photos from their social media feeds: a soldier standing in a group, another resting in a trench An emergency responder poses in front of a truck.
In each photo, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches with symbols made notorious by Nazi Germany and which have since become part of the iconography of far-right hate groups.
The photos and their deletions highlight the Ukrainian military’s complicated relationship with Nazi imagery, a relationship that arose during both the Soviet and German occupations of World War II.
That relationship has become particularly thorny because Russian President Vladimir V. Putin mistakenly declared Ukraine a Nazi state, a claim he has used to justify his illegal invasion.
Ukraine has worked for years to contain, through legislation and military restructuring, a far-right fringe movement whose members proudly wear symbols steeped in Nazi history and hold views hostile to the left, LGBTQ movements and ethnic minorities. However, some members of these groups have been fighting Russia since the Kremlin’s illegal annexation of part of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014 and are now part of the broader military structure. Some are considered national heroes, even if the far right remains politically marginalized.
The iconography of these groups, including a skull and crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front lines, including the Soldiers who say these images symbolizes the sovereignty and pride of Ukraine, not Nazism.
In the short term, this threatens to increase Mr Putin’s propaganda and fuel his false claims that Ukraine needs to be “denazified,” a position that ignores the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish. More broadly, Ukraine’s ambivalence towards, and sometimes even acceptance of, these symbols risks breathing new mainstream life into the symbols that the West has been trying to eliminate for more than half a century.
“What worries me in the Ukrainian context is that people in Ukraine who hold leadership positions either don’t do so or are unwilling to acknowledge and understand how these symbols are viewed outside of Ukraine,” said Michael Colborne, a researcher of the Bellingcat investigative group investigating the international far right. “I think Ukrainians must increasingly recognize that these images are undermining support for the country.”
In a statement, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said that Ukraine, as a country that had suffered greatly under German occupation, “categorically condemns every manifestation of Nazism.”
So far, the images have not undermined international support for the war. However, it has put diplomats, Western journalists and interest groups in a difficult position: drawing attention to the iconography risks damaging Russian propaganda. Saying nothing makes it possible to spread.
Even Jewish groups and anti-hate organizations, which have traditionally invoked hateful symbols, have largely remained silent. Secretly, some leaders fear they may appear to be picking up the talking points of Russian propaganda.
The question of how such symbols are to be interpreted is as controversial as it is persistent, and not just in Ukraine. In the American South some have insisted that the Confederate flag today symbolizes pride and not their history of racism and secession. The swastika was an important Hindu symbol before it was taken over by the Nazis.
In April the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine posted a photo on his Twitter account of a soldier wearing a patch featuring a skull and crossbones known as a skull and crossbones. The specific symbol in the image was made notorious by a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II.
The patch in the photo features the skull and crossbones on a Ukrainian flag with a small number 6 underneath. This patch is the official merchandise of Death in June, a British neo-folk band that produces “hate speech” that “exploits themes and imagery of fascism and Nazism” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The Anti-Defamation League considers the skull and crossbones to be “a common hate symbol.” But Jake Hyman, a spokesman for the group, said it was impossible to “make any inferences about the wearer or the Ukrainian army” from the patch.
“The image, while offensive, is that of a music band,” Hyman said.
The band are now using the photo posted by the Ukrainian military to market the skull patch.
The New York Times polled Ukraine’s Defense Ministry on April 27 about the tweet. The post was deleted a few hours later. “After investigating this case, we came to the conclusion that this logo is open to ambiguous interpretation,” the ministry said in a statement.
The soldier in the photo was part of a volunteer unit dubbed the “Da Vinci Wolves,” formed as part of Ukraine’s Right Sector paramilitary wing, a coalition of right-wing organizations and political parties that militarized after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea.
At least five other photos on the Wolves’ Instagram and Facebook pages show soldiers wearing Nazi-style patches, including the skull and crossbones.
NATO forces, an alliance that Ukraine wants to join, do not condone such patches. When such symbols emerged, groups like the Anti-Defamation League spoke out military leader have reacted quickly.
Last month, Ukraine’s State Emergency Medical Service posted a photo on Instagram of a rescue worker holding a Black Sun symbol, also known as a sun wheel, which could be seen in the palace of Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi general and SS director. The Black Sun is popular with neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
In March 2022, NATO’s Twitter account posted a photo of a Ukrainian soldier wearing a similar patch.
Both photos were quickly removed.
In November, during a meeting with Times reporters near the front lines, a Ukrainian press secretary wore a skull and crossbones variant made by a company called R3ICH (pronounced “rich”). He said he didn’t think the patch was related to the Nazis. A second spokesman who was present said other journalists had asked soldiers to remove the plaster before taking pictures.
Ihor Kozlovskyi, a Ukrainian historian and religious scholar, said that the symbols had a unique meaning for Ukraine and should be interpreted based on the way Ukrainians viewed them, not how they were used elsewhere.
“The symbol can live on in any community or story, regardless of how it’s used in other parts of the world,” Mr. Kozlovskyi said.
Russian soldiers were also seen in Ukraine with Nazi-style patchesThis underscores how complicated the interpretation of these symbols can be in a region steeped in Soviet and German history.
The Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in 1939 and two years later was surprised by the Nazis when they invaded Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. Ukraine had suffered greatly under the Soviet government, which caused a famine that killed millions. Many Ukrainians initially viewed the Nazis as liberators.
Factions of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and their insurgent army fought alongside the Nazis in a struggle for Ukraine’s sovereignty. Members of these groups also participated in atrocities against Jewish and Polish civilians. Later in the war, however, some of the groups fought against the Nazis.
Some Ukrainians joined Nazi military units such as the Waffen SS Galicia. The emblem of the group, led by German officers, was a sky-blue patch with a lion and three crowns. The unit participated a massacre of hundreds of Polish civilians in 1944. In December after years of litigationUkraine’s highest court ruled that a state-funded research institute could continue to list the unit’s insignia as exempt from the Nazi symbols banned under a 2015 law.
Today, as a new generation fights against Russian occupation, many Ukrainians see the war as a continuation of the struggle for independence during and immediately after World War II. Symbols such as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army flag and the Galicia badge have become symbols of anti-Russian resistance and national pride.
That makes it difficult to use icons alone to distinguish Ukrainians angry at the Russian invasion from those who support the country’s far-right groups.
Units such as the Da Vinci Wolves, the more well-known Azov regiment, and others that began with far-right members were incorporated into the Ukrainian military and were instrumental in defending Ukraine from Russian troops.
The Azov regiment was celebrated after holding out last year’s siege of the southern city of Mariupol. After the commander of the Da Vinci Wolves was killed in March, he received a hero’s funeral, which Mr. Zelenskyj also attended.
“I think some of these far-right entities mix a lot of their own myth-making into the public discourse about them,” said researcher Mr Colborne. “But I think the least that can and should be done anywhere, not just in Ukraine, is not to allow the symbols, rhetoric and ideas of the extreme right to invade public discourse.”
Kitty Bennett And Susan C Beachy contributed to the research.
