On February 17-18, Russian social networks Telegram (1,2), Odnoklassniki, and VKontakte circulated a shot that, according to the description of the posts, was cut from a BBC report and showed a Ukrainian serviceman wearing a Nazi chevron while meeting with Oleksandr Syrskyi, the new Commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
The photo circulated is a software-processed image; as per the original BBC report, the serviceman was wearing the emblem of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
On February 13, the BBC Russian service released a video about the new commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Oleksandr Syrskyi. The video contains biographical information about the commander. The shot circulated on social media was cut out of this video and then processed using software. In the original video, this frame appears at about 1:02 minutes, and it can be seen that the serviceman standing opposite Syrskyi is wearing the emblem of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on his arm – a black trident with a white outline on a green background.
Oleksandr Syrskyi replaced Valery Zaluzhny as Commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on February 8. Syrskyi was born in 1965 in Russia and has lived in Ukraine since the 1980s. After graduating from a military university, he served in the Soviet Artillery Corps. After the start of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in 2014, he was one of the commanders of the anti-terrorist operation in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. In 2019, Syrskyi became the head of Ukraine’s land forces. After a full-scale Russian invasion, Syrskyi led the successful defense of Kyiv and was awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine. In July 2022, Syrskyi led the counteroffensive that saw Ukrainian forces liberate the Kharkov region and regain territories in the east and southeast.
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