The ideological war embedded in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine gained another chapter with Kiev’s successful counteroffensive that retook almost the entire Kharkiv region this month.
The ball of the moment are the white crosses that started to be painted on the tanks and armored vehicles used by the Ukrainians in the attacks. They resemble the insignia used by the Wehrmacht, the Armed Forces of Nazi Germany (1933-45) on similar vehicles — planes had it on the fuselage and wings, with the more typical swastika on the tail.
“Armored column with the purest crosses of the Wehrmacht”, wrote the Russian military blog BMPD on the 7th, in a post that included a series of Ukrainian tanks heading for Balaklia, one of the first small towns reconquered by Kiev in the northeast of the country.
The association, made on Russian military Telegram channels, is far from innocent. One of Vladimir Putin’s rhetorical justifications for launching his war on February 24 was the alleged denazification of the neighboring country, something that recalls the historical memory of the entire region, which was violently invaded by the Nazis in 1941.
Then part of the Soviet Union like Russia, Ukraine was the scene of bloody battles throughout World War II, until it was liberated in 1944, the year before the conflict ended. The country had a strong nationalist movement associated with fascism that collaborated with the invaders against a common enemy: the communist government of Moscow.
It was a late stage in the formative conflict of the Soviet empire, the Russian Civil War of 1917-22, which pitted monarchists and nationalists against Bolshevik revolutionaries — ultimately victorious. Similar scenarios were seen in the Baltic States when the Nazis occupied them from 1941 to 1944.
In Ukraine, one of the greatest fascist leaders of the 20th century, Stepan Bandera (1909-1959), is to this day revered in some Kiev political circles, and this is denounced in almost every speech by Russian officials about the war.
The symbol on the tanks may have nothing to do with it: the Cossack cross, in various colors, is a common military insignia in the country. The emblem of the Armed Forces of Ukraine bears the trident of the Principality of Kiev that symbolizes the country over a red cross.
But confusion is guaranteed, not least because it fits into the narrative dispute on both sides. Even President Volodymyr Zelensky’s t-shirts with military symbols have been called fascists on social media.
It doesn’t help his government that several military units under his command have known associations with neo-Nazi ideology. The most famous of them is the Azov Regiment, which was incorporated into the National Guard after the outbreak of civil war in Donbass (east of the country) against pro-Moscow separatists in 2014.
He was severely affected in the Russian campaign in southern Ukraine. Its fame has now been supplanted by the Kraken Regiment, created on the day of the invasion to rally volunteers and which operates under orders from the Ministry of Defense but not the Army. He is at the forefront of the advance in Kharkiv, and he has a number of radical nationalists and Azov egresses.
Naturally, from there to say that the Zelensky government is Nazi, as Putin accuses, there is a good distance. But there are elements to fuel the accusations made by the Russian side, and any detail ends up being highlighted – as seen in the case of the crosses.
They were seen on T-72 and T-64 tanks, as well as western armored vehicles. The crosses also serve a simpler function: to differentiate vehicles in the field, since Ukraine and Russia use a lot of similar material, of Soviet origin.
That’s what the Russians did at the beginning of the war, painting letters like Z, O and V to identify their tanks and avoid friendly fire.
OZ, in particular, became a symbol of the invasion, being advertised by the Ministry of Defense in phrases that included it, phonetically because the letter does not exist in the Cyrillic alphabet used in Russian and Ukrainian, such as “For Victory”. Soviet flags were also seen with troops from Moscow, echoing the war of the 1940s.
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