For patriotism and profit, Ukrainians line up to buy a war stamp

The crowd of hundreds outside the kyiv Central Post Office was growing restless. Some of them had been queuing for more than eight hours, just to buy a stamp.

Not just any stamp. A stamp depicting a lone Ukrainian soldier turning his back on a gray Russian warship perfectly captures this country’s spirit of defiance through one of the iconic moments of this 56-day war.

The image is based on the response of Roman Hrybov, the commander of a unit of the State Border Guard Service of 19 who were stationed on Snake Island, a Ukrainian outpost in the Black Sea, at the beginning of war.

On February 25, the second day of the war, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the guided missile cruiser Moskva, approached the island and demanded that the Ukrainian garrison capitulate.

“This is a Russian warship,” someone says in an audio recording of the exchange between Cdr. Hrybov and the Moskva that quickly went viral in Ukraine and beyond. “I ask you to lay down your arms and surrender to avoid unnecessary bloodshed and death. Otherwise, you will be bombarded.”

cdr. Hrybov can be heard playfully asking a member of his unit if he should make his position clear.

He then responds with a line that is now on billboards and bumper stickers across this war-torn country: “Russian warship, fuck you.”

cdr. Initially, Hrybov and the other guards were believed to have been killed outright, though it turned out that they had been taken prisoner. The 19 returned to Ukraine in a prisoner exchange late last month, and Cdr. Hrybov received a medal.

The episode became even more famous after the Moskva, which had fired cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities during the first seven weeks of the war, sank on April 14. Though Russia claims the warship accidentally caught fire and then sank while being towed to the dock for repairs. , Ukraine says that she sank after being hit by two anti-ship missiles.

Among the hundreds lining up outside kyiv’s main post office were people who considered buying one of the commemorative stamps part patriotic duty, part collection of souvenirs.

One million copies of the warship stamp have been printed and more than 700,000 have already been sold.

“Maybe it’s our patriotism. We want to help. As far as we know, the money will go to support the army,” said Anna Kobushkina, a 25-year-old surgeon who said she had been in line for an hour.

Each stamp costs 24 Ukrainian hryvnya, four of which go to the country’s armed forces. “I’m going to buy as many as I can get,” he said.

With hundreds of people ahead of her, and those at the front beginning to push and shove, Ms. Kobushkina seemed to have little chance of making it to the post office before the end of the business day.

She said Cdr. Hrybov’s act was “a beautiful moment” that captured the country’s struggle for independence, and he added that he hoped to one day pass the stamps on to his grandchildren.

“By their actions they showed that even a small group of Ukrainians is not ready to give up,” Ihor Krupsky, a 56-year-old pharmacist who had also been in line for an hour, said of the soldiers who defied Moskva. “For me personally, this means that even though Ukraine is not a big country, we will resist the Russian aggressor by all possible means.”

Some believe the defiance of the Snake Island guards has helped inspire Ukraine’s broader war effort, in which the country’s smaller armed forces defied predictions by holding off one of the world’s largest armies. . Earlier this month, Russia was forced to at least temporarily abandon its attempt to seize kyiv in order to concentrate its forces on a smaller battlefield to the east.

But in a country that has suffered a catastrophic economic blow since the start of the war, many of those who lined up to buy stamps on Wednesday did so less out of patriotism than a need to earn some money. The International Monetary Fund predicted this week that Ukraine’s gross domestic product would fall 35 percent this year, almost entirely as a result of the war.

The stamps cost the equivalent of about $1 each at the post office, but packs of 12 were selling for several thousand dollars on eBay and other websites on Wednesday.

For the most part, people want to buy them and then just sell them, said Oleksey Oleksandrovich, a 22-year-old who gave only his first name and patronymic and said he had been in line since 5 a.m. He planned to immediately sell whatever stamps he could buy. to a friend, who wanted to keep them a little longer to see if prices would continue to rise.

Ihor Smilyanskyi, chief executive of the national postal service, Ukrposhta, was mobbed by stamp diggers when he arrived in front of the main post office, which is located on central kyiv’s Independence Square, on Wednesday afternoon. Some demanded that volunteers helping the country’s armed forces get priority access to stamps.

Mr. Smilyanskyi told The Globe and Mail that even if most of the people lining up at the post office were trying to make some money, the prices being paid for the stamp elsewhere spoke for themselves. alone.

“I think the popularity of the stamp around the world is sending the message to the Russian military where to go. And I am happy that this message is sent more than a million times.”

He said that Ukrposhta was already designing more limited-edition patriotic stamps. He even hinted that the Moskva might appear again in one, as it is now a “submarine”.

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