russian military tattoos

Russian Military Tattoos - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky looks at the site of the recent battle in Bucha in April 2022 (Efrem Lukatsky/AP)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has produced no shortage of headline-grabbing and internationally celebrated propaganda in the months since Russia's unprovoked invasion.

Russian Military Tattoos

The somber olive-robed leader has been likened to military leaders of old, defiant in the face of rare barbarism that has now escalated into nuclear threats and a recruitment of hundreds of thousands of grossly untrained and ill-equipped Russian reservists.

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As has become his norm, Zelensky responded to such posturing with a disappearing verbal attack, calling the mobilization of Russian reserves "an attempt to provide commanders on the ground with a steady stream of cannons."

In a separate video released this week, Zelensky went out of his way to direct that flow to Russian tattoo shops, urging mobilized reservists to "tattoo your name and surname so we know how to find your relatives when they kill you."

“The Russian authorities are sending people to this war without an army [dog tags], often without documents!” Zelensky said. “They do this on purpose to make it easier for you to lie about how many people are really dying here. This is their special operation.

And while Zelensky's statement will undoubtedly add fuel to Ukraine's already raging propaganda inferno, the proposal is not unusual in the context of tattooing's military history, and may even evoke memories of dozens of American workers who ventured into tattoo shops with similar, if more optimistic, requests.

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The ink, known colloquially as a "meat mark," is traditionally tattooed with the identification—and often the blood type—of an individual expecting a fight.

People who wear them often place the tattoos high on the chest, an area less susceptible to gruesome injuries than the limbs, so that others can identify them in case their remains are unrecognizable—and the physical dog tag strapped to their left shoe is nowhere to be found. .

Such tattoos became extremely popular among soldiers in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even acting as a right of passage for many young servicemen attached to combat units. Flesh tags were styled as simple lines of text, like the shape of a dog tag, or even designed to look like a chain with a dog tag sticking out of the split hide.

"The meat tags are so they can go home no matter what," tattoo artist Jesse Mays previously told the BBC about inking the Marines at Camp Lejeune. "So someone can complain about them." ... That's why we have a monument to the unknown, right? They could not be identified. They can identify my boys. I'm doing God's work here."

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Divine work aside, tattooed forms of identification have existed in some form for millennia. In the context of modern history, nuclear threats during the Cold War prompted many cities to consider large-scale blood type tattoos of men, women, and children, a measure designed to expedite blood transfusions on site in the event of an atomic bomb. explosion.

"[Blood type] tattoos are placed on the body near a person's armpits so that they are inconspicuous and less likely to be erased in case of injury," said a 1951 Chicago Daily Tribune article about an initiative to inking about 200,000 residents of Lake County, Indiana.

Years before the nuclear hysteria of the Cold War petrified the world, Nazi SS soldiers were tattooed – also near their armpits – with a small mark that identified the individual's blood type. Some of these marks became vital identification factors used by Allied prosecutors during the war criminal trials that followed in the years after World War II.

In the 19th century, British army commander Frederick Roberts became known as an outspoken proponent of identification tattoos.

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"Every officer in the British Army should have their regimental crest tattooed," Roberts said. "Not only does it promote esprit de corps, but it also helps identify victims."

But esprit de corps may be in short supply among Russian soldiers ordered to buy tampons to patch bullet holes, or among those equipped with AK-47s baked enough rust to suggest they were retrieved from the sunken Russian warship Moskva.

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Before Russia's attack on Ukraine on February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he wanted to "denazify" and demilitarize the neighboring country. More than nine months later, social media users continue to accuse Ukraine of espousing Nazi ideology.

A post shared on Instagram ( direct link , archive link ) includes several images of a man with a tattoo of a large eagle and a swastika on his back. One of the images shows what appears to be a man's waist.

"And just like that, liberals don't want to beat Nazis anymore," read the text of the Dec. 1 post. "Ukrainian soldiers are still captured with these tattoos."

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The post garnered more than 600 likes in four days. Similar versions of the claim were shared on Instagram.

But the statement is false. The images predate the current conflict and show a Russian national arrested by Ukrainian soldiers in 2015. According to local media, he planned to kill Ukrainians in the Donbass region of Ukraine.

The images are part of a 2015 article published by the Ukrainian publication Details. The man in the photos is a Russian citizen named Roman Tolstokorov, who the article says was arrested by soldiers of the Right Sector, a Ukrainian paramilitary formation.

Tolstokorov is said to be from Stavropol, Russia, with a Russian passport and was employed by the Donetsk People's Republic army as a driver. The republic is one of two territories in the Donbass region where fighting has raged between Ukrainian and Russian-backed separatists since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, CNN reported.

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Footage of Tolstokarov and his passport was also featured in a 2015 broadcast on Ukrainian news channel TSN. The broadcast description similarly states that Tolstokovor was detained by Right Sector soldiers after being hired as a driver by the army of the Donetsk People's Republic.

"The prisoner himself said that he fought in Shirokin for a month and was supposed to receive a reward of 15,000 rubles," the description says.

Tolstokovor described the swastika on his back as a "prison tattoo" and claimed he was beaten by a group of extremists for it, Details reported.

TSN footage shows Tolstokov carrying a red Russian Federation passport with the Russian coat of arms printed on the front. Ukrainian passport would be blue with Ukrainian trident.

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Since 2016, Ukraine has started replacing passports with plastic ID cards, although many Ukrainians already use a mobile app called "Diia" to access different forms of identification.

Based on our research, we rate as FALSE the claim that the image shows a captured Ukrainian soldier with a swastika tattooed on his back. The images show a Russian national who was arrested by Ukrainian soldiers in 2015. He was planning to kill Ukrainians in Donbas, according to local reports.

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