In Cyrillic the letter “z” is written “з”. But since Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the Latin variant has spread within Russia.
Just a few days after the attack, Maria Butina, a former Russian spy converted to politics, made a video in which she draws a zeta on her coat. “Come on brothers,” she says in the video. “We are with you forever”. The governor of Kemerovo, a mining region in Siberia, known informally as Kuzbass (Kuzbass‘in Cyrillic), decreed that this name will henceforth be written in a mixture of Cyrillic and Latin characters: KuZbass. Russian gymnast Ivan Kuljak applied a zeta to his shirt when he stood on the podium alongside a Ukrainian opponent during the Qatar Gymnastics World Championships on March 5, prompting the International Gymnastics Federation to initiate disciplinary proceedings against him. Why has the letter “z” become a symbol of Vladimir Putin’s support for the war?
As Russian troops massed along Ukraine’s borders earlier this year, keen observers of data and information from open sources spotted curious characters painted on the flanks of Russian tanks. Among these were the letter “v”, the letter “z” inserted in a box and a simple zeta. These mysterious inscriptions spawned a myriad of theories: perhaps the zeta was the first letter of west, which means west in Russian (the direction in which Russian troops would march). Or perhaps it indicated the Kremlin’s desire to wipe out Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskii. Military analysts, on the other hand, believe that the letters correspond to specific divisions of the Russian troops engaged in the invasion. Over one hundred battalion tactical groups (each made up of six hundred to one thousand soldiers), also coming from the Russian Far East, are operating in Ukraine. A hallmark perhaps serves to distinguish them from enemy forces on the battlefield.
Since the fighting began, the Russian state propaganda machine has turned the zeta into the unofficial logo of the operation. The Russian defense ministry has suggested that the letter stands for for, which in Russian means “for”, as in “for victory”. Rt, the Russian propaganda TV channel, has started selling T-shirts decorated with the letter z. Which also shows off on the laptop of Vladimir Solovyov, a host and propagandist of state television, in his latest video appearances. In Ekaterinburg, a medium-sized city close to Siberia, warmongering graffiti has appeared in which this letter appears several times. Nationalist activists in Moscow organized a caravan of cars decorated with the letter z, which toured the city. In a children’s hospital in Kazan, a city in western Russia, some children were lined up in a zeta-shaped row for a photo shoot. And in stating his support for Putin, the director of the charity that runs the hospital told a local news agency that Ukraine’s “fascist” forces, as Putin called the country’s democratically elected leaders, ” they can only be stopped by force, there is no other way, no mercy! ”.
The adoption of the zeta a few days after the start of operations suggests that Russia’s information warfare planning may be as chaotic as military plans have been. It is particularly ironic that a Latin letter has become the symbol of a war that Putin justified, in part, with the pretext that the Russian language was threatened in Ukraine. The zeta had never been associated with Putin’s regime in the past, and it does not possess any of the long-standing symbolisms of other infamous icons, such as the Nazi swastika, to which the Ukrainian defense minister has compared it. Yet the letter has already become a creepy abbreviation.
Opposition members and other people who have spoken out against the war inside Russia say a z was scribbled in their apartments. Russian security agents left a zeta in the offices of Memorial, a historic human rights association, after raiding its premises. Some Russian officials have adopted it to show their loyalty to their leader. More than anything else, the letter z is now a pro Putin symbol.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)