Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has come up with a rather strange way of marking the 77th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany by sharing online what appears to be an image of a soldier sporting Nazi insignia.
Even as Zelensky on Instagram* and Telegram gushed over “fighting for a new victory” on the “Day of Victory over Nazism”, the two posts he made on these social media networks featured a photo of a man in fatigues standing next to an artillery piece and wearing what looks like insignia of the 3rd SS Panzer Division "Totenkopf" – an elite division of Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS.
The image in question has since been removed from both social media posts in question, although the comments left by social media users who reacted to Zelensky’s choice of imagery can still be seen in the Instagram post’s comment section, for example.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence shared Zelensky’s statement in a tweet accompanied by several photos, one of them being a photo of the man with the Totenkopf insignia, with the said picture remaining in place at the time of this article’s writing.
*Instagram is banned in Russia over extremist activities