When 20-year-old Russian athlete Ivan Kulyak stepped onto the podium at the Gymnastics World Cup next to competition winner Ilya Kovtun of Ukraine, a subtle symbol on his uniform prompted an official investigation into his behavior and widespread condemnation from the international community.
The letter Z, taped with white tape to Mr. Kulyak’s white shirt when he received his bronze medal in parallel bars at a ceremony in Doha, Qatar, on Saturday, became a symbol of pride for those who support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. attacking military forces. In the West, he is condemned as a manifestation of nationalist sentiments.
The International Gymnastics Federation, which on Monday banned Russian and Belarusian athletes from its events, said it had opened disciplinary proceedings against Mr. Kulyak.
The letter first appeared on Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers as they piled up near the border with Ukraine days before Russian troops crossed the border. Military analysts say the letter, along with other markers, is used by the Russian military as identifiers to distinguish their vehicles on the battlefield from Ukrainian ones.
After the invasion, the “Z” iconography appeared on cars, on the banners of pro-Kremlin rallies, and on billboards in the Moscow and St. Petersburg metros. On Saturday, at a children’s hospice in the center of Kazan, patients were taken outside to form a letter for a photo shoot.
In recent days, pro-government videos featuring the symbol have been widely circulated on social media. One such clip opens with a speech in support of the Russian armed forces by Anton Demidov, a nationalist activist, followed by hundreds of people gathered in a warehouse-like space waving Russian flags and chanting “Russia!” and the name of President Vladimir Putin.
Ukrainian residents were on the run when Russia fired on an evacuation route in the suburbs of Kyiv. The Russian-occupied city of Kherson saw acts of defiance this weekend, including a man standing in a Russian military vehicle and waving a Ukrainian flag. Photo: Markus Schreiber/Associated Press
“I don’t know where this symbol came from,” Mr. Demidov said in an interview, adding that pro-Kremlin activists saw it on Russian tanks in Ukraine and started using it. “The symbol is not important. What matters is what position he represents, and we understand that we need to support our president and our army in their difficult task.”
The Russian Defense Ministry and other government agencies have used the easily replicable symbol to rally the country around the war, which Moscow has described as a “special military operation.”
Shortly after Russia started the war, the state-backed TV channel RT began selling T-shirts with such slogans. Some companies have replaced the Cyrillic version of Z with the Latin letter in their brand logos, and some government officials have swapped letters on their social media profiles. In Russian, the word “for” is written as “for”, and the Ministry of Defense flooded Instagram with posts “for peace”, “for our guys”, “for victory” using the English letter Z.
A Ukrainian serviceman stands near captured Russian tanks, one of which is painted in the color of the Ukrainian national flag and the other marked with the letter Z, in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine.
Photo: IRINA RYBAKOVA / PRESS SERVICE / via REUTERS
Local governments across the country have joined in by lighting up windows in their government buildings, forming a Z at night.
“It is a symbol of the unity of the people,” Ivan Zhernakov, an official in the northern Arkhangelsk region who heads the department of patriotic education, told local state media. “It symbolizes the support of our armed forces, support for the decisions of the President and is intended to unite us in this difficult situation.”
In Ukraine, the symbol took root in a different way.
Oleksiy Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister, on Monday compared the symbol to the iconography of Nazi Germany, posting an image of a swastika-like logo formed from two intertwined Z’s that has been circulating on Ukrainian social media. He also tweeted: “In 1943, near the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, there was station Z where massacres were carried out,” referring to the Nazi death camp.
The references to Nazi Germany come amid Russia’s false claims that the Ukrainian government is run by neo-Nazis and that one of its war goals is to “denazify” the country. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish.
In Russia, the letter Z caused some resistance. A traffic reporter for a state TV channel in Moscow went viral on social media on Monday after telling viewers that if they stick a Z symbol on the rear windows of their cars, they are likely to have more accidents and have their cars hit by objects. But the letter has also been graffitied on the property of those who oppose the war in recent days.
Russia’s most prominent human rights group, which chronicled the country’s human rights abuses before a court forced it to close in December, said on Saturday that security officials painted a Z on its building after a search of the premises.
An activist from the protest feminist punk rock band Pussy Riot, who has opposed Putin for years, tweeted a photo of a letter she said she had painted on her apartment’s front door.
The claims could not be independently verified.
And the most famous Russian film critic Anton Dolin found a letter on his door before leaving the country. “The message was absolutely clear. The people who did this know that I am against the war,” Mr. Dolin said by telephone from Latvia. “They showed that they know where I live and where my family lives. It’s an act of intimidation.”
Mr. Dolin said that for him the letter is less like Nazi iconography and more like a popular zombie movie. “It’s like World War Z,” he said, referring to the 2013 Hollywood film starring Brad Pitt, based on the book of the same name. “I see in him our zombified army and the zombified part of the population that watches state television and supports the operation.”
His children, he says, see a different meaning in the symbol: Evil, or evil in Russian.
Write to Evan Gershkovich at [email protected] and Matthew Luxmoore at [email protected]
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