Troops’ use of patches bearing Nazi emblems risks fueling Russian propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century trying to eliminate.
An image of a Ukrainian soldier wearing a patch containing the Totenkopf symbol, an example of Nazi iconography, that was posted on the Twitter account of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, then deleted.
KYIV, Ukraine — Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine last year, the Ukrainian government and NATO allies have posted, then quietly deleted, three seemingly innocuous photographs from their social media feeds: a soldier standing in a group, another resting in a trench and an emergency worker posing in front of a truck.
In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of far-right hate groups.
The photographs, and their deletions, highlight the Ukrainian military’s complicated relationship with Nazi imagery, a relationship forged under both Soviet and German occupation during World War II.
Non-paywalled version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230719144406/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/world/europe/nazi-symbols-ukraine.html
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