The Secret of the Z Is Out

Ukrainian wartime humor at its best:

Question: why are all Russian vehicles in Ukraine marked with a "Z"?

Answer: the other half of the swastika was stolen by military contractors pic.twitter.com/wDbNOUKYRk

— Business Ukraine mag (@Biz_Ukraine_Mag) March 24, 2022

Comments

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

O my! One of those things which is so obvious that I will kick myself for days for not having seen it sooner.

[Currentsitguy]

You gotta love the cynicism of Eastern European humor.

[dwb68]

I don't get it. I mean, I get the joke, but I dont understand how two "Z"s make a swastika.

[Eugene Volokh]

Just imagine the Z with a less slanted diagonal than usual, and then overlay it with the same shape rotated 90 degrees. Or am I not getting your joke?

[dwb68]

ahh, got it 🙂

[MatthewSlyfield]

This is all wrong. The real explanation for the Z is that Putin is a puppet for Lord Zedd

[John F. Carr]

I hate to ruin a joke, but the "all" is wrong. There are four symbols, each used in a different region. V in the north, O in the northeast, Z in a square in the east, and Z alone in the south.

[mydisplayname]

What is potentially more amusing is that a single shot mistakenly fired (by either side) into a still-flagged embassy of a NATO nation would by treaty trigger a NATO response, a la World War I: there is good reason not to wage war near an embassy and equally good reason to leave one flag flying over one embassy. [The one still flying is not the US flag.]

Still more amusing is that one nation claims a 100-or-more to one kill ratio against nasty, terrible invaders: the slogan "we've killed the most people" is not all that effective in the pivotal nations of Germany, India, and China (or elsewhere).

[Longtobefree]

Rule number 47 of warfare: Do not fight an enemy who has the same equipment as you do.

[James Pollock]

"We don't target civilians" is still being focus-group tested.

[Social Justice is neither]

Given the Azov Battalion is Ukranian I'm confused, are Ukranian military contractors stealing Russian equipment? I mean they're both corrupt regimes so there is that.

[Absaroka]

When the bank robber drops his gun in the bank, and the police pick it up, we usually don't phrase that as 'the police stole the bank robber's gun'.

[Social Justice is neither]

Your phrasing of it is why my confusion. This is more like the bank robber drops the cash and the joke is the security guard only returned half of the dropped money.

To be clear, the Z is Russian on Russian equipment, the Nazis are in the Ukranian forces and the joke is that the Nazi adjacent defense contractors stole half the swastica.

[Absaroka]

"the Nazis are in the Ukranian forces"

Ahh. My sense is that the Ukrainians are viewing Putin/the Russian Army as the Nazis. Their definition is based not on the obscurities of who nominally owns the means of production or whatever, but who is invading their country. From the Ukrainian POV, the Russians today are doing precisely what the Germans did in 1941, and for the same reason. So, walks like a duck...

[David Nieporent]

To be clear, the Russians are acting like the Nazis, and the claim that Ukrainians are Nazis is Russian propaganda so transparent that one would have to be on Russia's payroll to pretend to believe it.

[James Pollock]

You're overgeneralizing. You don't have to be on the Russian payroll to believe their propaganda. There are some people who are so used to receiving propaganda that it just doesn't occur to them that there's any other kind of information.

[Ridgeway]

As with all good propaganda, the Russian claims seem to have at least a grain of truth to them. When you look into the Azov Battalion, they seem to have some less-than-savory characters.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/29/europe/ukraine-azov-movement-far-right-intl-cmd/index.html

However, rubles-to-blinis, I'll bet there are more skinhead neo-Nazi types in Russia than in Ukraine.