In June 2025, a photograph taken at a meeting of representatives of Russia and Ukraine in Turkey went viral on the Internet. It is alleged that on the uniform of one of the Ukrainian delegates there was a patch with the symbols of the Nazi punitive unit. We checked if this is true.
June 2 in Turkey took place the second round of direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, resumed in the spring of 2025. On the same day, messages went viral on RuNet that one of the members of the Ukrainian delegation wore a military uniform with Nazi symbols to a meeting. “The Rada is shocked because of its own ‘peacekeeper’ with an SS insignia at a meeting in Istanbul,” the tabloid reported Life.ru. Later, the publication published a commentary by radio host Armen Gasparyan, whom he presented as a historian. “Two crossed grenades on a black shield, silver grenades are the symbol of the 36th SS Division “Dirlewanger”. This is a punitive unit that has committed an incredible number of war crimes,” told Gasparyan. The presenter made a similar comment in a conversation with the Telegram channel Lomovka (110,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), and also reposted both publications to my own channel (70,000 And 71,000 views).
Similar posts appeared in other Telegram channels, including Zergulio (184,000 views), "News from the front" (43,000), "News.ru | News"(33,000), "Paragraph"(28,000), etc. Special correspondent of the newspaper "Komsomolskaya Pravda" Dmitry Steshin in his channel "Russian tarantass“(56,000 views) stated (spelling and punctuation preserved): “Even an idiot will recognize the photo from the negotiations and the shield of the Dirlivanger Brigade, M24 knocker grenades. Modern armies do not have anything similar in armament. crests will say that these are hetman’s maces, but we know that...” Columnist for the publication “Paragraph” Andrey Perla also wrote, that the chevron with the photo does not belong to any of the active units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and asked the question: “Why does a Ukrainian officer or official need this [Nazi] emblem?” Similar publications can be found on the website News.ru, on VKontakte (examples here, here And here) and in X, where one tweet received 126,000 views.
The authors of some of the posts and notes mentioned at the beginning of the analysis are: referred on the Telegram channel of Verkhovna Rada deputy Artyom Dmitruk, who left Ukraine in August 2024. According to the State Bureau of Investigation of Ukraine, he crossed the border illegally, and the agency excited there is a criminal case against him. Soon Dmitruk announced on the international wanted list - he is accused of causing bodily harm and other crimes. In recent years, the name of a politician who has been in the press called pro-Russian, was associated with a series of scandals: for example, he arranged fights, spoke against vaccination, and criticized operation of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Kursk region. The deputy himself named the cases opened against him were “a completely falsified and fictitious story” and stated that his pursue “for the state position, political views and defense of the Orthodox faith.”
In Dmitruk's Telegram channel recording about the SS chevron appeared on June 2, 2025 at 15:20 Moscow time, received more than 60,000 views and, apparently, became the first on this topic (at least, earlier “Verified” posts could not be found). The deputy published two images: a photo of the Ukrainian delegate at the negotiations in Istanbul and a screenshot pages with the logo of the 36th SS Volunteer Infantry Division on Wikipedia. This punitive unit, also known as the SS Sonderkommando under the command of Oskar Dirlewanger, was staffed by German prisoners. “Peacekeepers are negotiating with SS insignia,” Dmitruk wrote.
In his post, the politician provided a low-resolution photograph, and when looking at this frame, one may indeed get the impression that the patch shows two crossed white grenades. If you find good quality pictures (for example, from correspondents TASS or AFP), then it will become clear: the chevron depicts two clubs. Moreover, such an emblem was on the uniform immediately several a person from the Ukrainian delegation.
How explains fact-checking project StopFake, a chevron with crossed clubs on a black background is the sleeve insignia of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, whose representatives were part of the negotiating group from Ukraine. For example, on website The Ukrainian Armed Forces exactly the same patch can be seen on the uniform of the Chief of the Ukrainian General Staff, Major General Andrei Gnatov.
In 2023, in a conversation with Radio Liberty, historian Alexander Surchenko explained, that modern emblems of Ukrainian military units use Cossack symbols of power, including maces. “For the Cossacks, the mace was precisely a symbol, an attribute of the hetman, the chieftain. <…> On the general’s shoulder straps there are also crossed maces,” said Surchenko. How wrote Ukrainian historian and heraldist Nikolai Chmir, the military of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic used a similar symbol (two crossed yellow maces) back in 1918–1919.
However, the authors of some pro-Kremlin Telegram channels were not embarrassed by the fact that the Ukrainian’s patch had maces, not grenades. For example, in "Explosion point» (15,000 views) from link They wrote to the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation: “Anticrisis was found among crests. In short, at the peace negotiations in Istanbul, one of the negotiators had a chevron on his shoulder reminiscent of the chevron of the SS Dirlewanger division - the same one that distinguished itself with enormous cruelty against civilians. The crests make excuses, saying that it seemed to you, but this is a chevron from another Ukrainian division. But if you take a closer look at the crests’ logo, then... is there much of a difference? They are literally practically the same thing, just changed elements. Even the color is the same. But there is no Nazism there, there is only nationalism. Their president is Jewish.”
Thus, there was no SS chevron on the shoulder of a member of the Ukrainian delegation at the negotiations in Istanbul. In fact, several negotiators at once had the emblem of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on their military uniforms. It, contrary to reports from Russian media and Telegram channels, does not depict German grenades, but crossed maces.
Cover photo: social networks
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