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In March 2022, as Russia continued its invasion of Ukraine, an image started circulating on social media that supposedly showed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy holding a swastika jersey. This is not a genuine photograph of Zelenskyy but another piece of propaganda that tries to depict Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, as a Nazi in order to justify Russia's invasion of the country. A few days after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an attack on Ukraine at the end of February 2022, he attempted to justify this action (which he dubbed a special operation instead of an attack or an invasion) by saying that the goal of Russia's invasion was to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine. A group of historians and scholars of Nazism, World War II, and genocide published a letter in Jewish Journal that labeled Putin's claim that Ukraine was run by Nazis as factually wrong and morally repugnant. The above-displayed image was created by altering a genuine photograph of Zelenskyy holding the jersey of the national team of Ukraine ahead of Euro 2020. Here's the original photograph: Zelenskyy first posted this photograph to Instagram in June 2021. The new soccer uniforms proved to be a bit controversial at the time as they featured an outline of Ukraine that included Crimea, a portion of the country that was annexed by Russia in 2014. Zelenskyy wrote:
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