In August 2025, photographs of towels with the slogan “Glory to Ukraine!” were embroidered on social networks. and a yellow-blue flag. Internet users report that such bath accessories are now being issued to Russian tourists in Turkey to reduce the number of thefts from hotels. We have verified the accuracy of this story.
News of the trick allegedly used in Turkish hotels spread on August 23. As proof, social network users post two pictures, both of which show a neatly folded set of towels with the phrase “Glory to Ukraine!” embroidered on them. Similar publications can be meet V Facebook, Threads, X And TikTok.
Türkiye is one of the most popular vacation destinations for Russians, and the restrictions on flights introduced after the start of the war in Ukraine only increased flow of tourists. In June 2025 alone, more than 800,000 Russian citizens visited Turkey.
However, there is no information in reputable Turkish media that local hotels have begun to take special measures to reduce the level of thefts. It is logical to assume that among the hundreds of thousands of visitors there was at least one person who could independently photograph a towel with the inscription “Glory to Ukraine!” and post the photo on social networks. But no such “Verified” posts could be found.
In the first of two viral photos, towels lie in a stack, each embroidered with a Ukrainian flag and the slogan “Glory to Ukraine!” A reverse search for this image led to the original photo, which is posted on the website of a Ukrainian online store polotenca.ua.
Goods purchased in this store are delivered from the city of Khmelnitsky, while the order form does not allow you to select any country of receipt other than Ukraine, and delivery is carried out only by domestic courier services. Similar textiles can be found in other Ukrainian websites, but the situation is similar everywhere: stores ship goods only within the country. It is unlikely that Turkish hotels will cooperate en masse with small Ukrainian textile stores, especially with those who do not supply goods abroad.
In the case of the second photo, a reverse image search did not produce results, but the photo itself looks unnatural. There are no folds on the towels, the light falls too evenly. This suggests that the image may have been created using AI. AI Content Discovery Tool Sightengine estimated the probability that the image was generated by a neural network to be 99%.
The earliest publication that talked about applying the phrase “Glory to Ukraine!” for towels in Turkey and which was found by “Verified”, appeared in X on the user page “Vladimir, Krasnoyarsk! Yenisei! (@O45SwNQkQ8yk9nW) back on May 29, 2025 at 16:16 Moscow time. That post did not go viral, gaining only 2,000 views, but in August other users began to spread the same information. Moreover, now this statement has spread as far as Russian, and on Ukrainian And others languages, and other images of towels began to be used as illustrations.
Mirror fakes - about painting the Russian coat of arms on towels, supposedly designed to discourage Ukrainian tourists from stealing in Turkish hotels - have been appearing in pro-Kremlin sources for several years in anticipation of the holiday season. Similar publications were widely distributed in the media and Telegram channels in 2022 And 2023 years with reference to the now deceased press secretary of the singer Shaman Anton Korobkov-Zemlyansky. In 2025, publications about embroidering the Russian coat of arms on towels appeared again - word for word copied from posts of previous years. However, over three years, not a single confirmation has been found that such a practice is widely used in Turkish hotels where Ukrainians stay.
Thus, there is not a single piece of evidence that in Turkey they began to put the phrase “Glory to Ukraine!” on hotel towels as part of the fight against theft. Photos of such bath products distributed as evidence are either downloaded from open sources or created using AI. At the same time, the mirror story that Ukrainian tourists are scared away with towels with the Russian coat of arms has not been confirmed.
Cover photo: social networks
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