Originally published 2022-02-24. Dates, ages and announcements in this article refer to February 2022.
On 24 February 2022, the morning Russian forces crossed into Ukraine, Ukraine’s official Twitter account (@Ukraine) posted a single image with no text: a cartoon of Adolf Hitler looking on approvingly at Vladimir Putin. It was a wartime message from a government under attack, and it compressed a whole argument into one drawing: that Russia’s invasion belonged in the same family as Nazi Germany’s territorial grabs of the late 1930s.
The post spread quickly and was picked up by international outlets, including The Times of Israel, which noted that Hitler–Putin comparisons had already become a regular sight at pro-Ukraine protests in the days before the invasion. Below is what the image showed, why that particular comparison was chosen, where it came from, and what it can and cannot tell a reader.
What Ukraine posted on 24 February 2022
The tweet contained only the picture. In it, a caricatured Hitler, instantly recognisable from his moustache and side parting, appears to give his blessing to a figure of Putin, like a mentor pleased with a pupil. The artist was not named in the post or in the news reports that covered it, so the drawing is best described simply as a cartoon shared by Ukraine’s official account.
— Ukraine / Україна (@Ukraine) February 24, 2022
The timing matters. Russia launched its full-scale invasion at dawn that day, minutes after Putin delivered a televised address shortly before 5 a.m. Kyiv time. Three days earlier, on 21 February, he had formally recognised the Russian-backed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” as independent states, and Moscow then announced it was sending troops there as “peacekeepers.” For Ukrainians, the cartoon was a reply posted while missiles were already landing.
The @Ukraine account had built a reputation for an informal, often sharp tone before the war. Posting a cartoon rather than a written statement fitted that style: an image can be understood at a glance in any language and travels further on social media than a paragraph of diplomatic text.
Why the Hitler comparison, and why that day
The choice of Hitler was not random. In the speech announcing the invasion, Putin said Russia aimed to “demilitarise and denazify” Ukraine, and he portrayed Ukrainian officials as neo-Nazis. Those claims were made without evidence and were widely described as baseless. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is himself Jewish, which made the “denazification” framing look especially hollow to many observers.
The cartoon turned that accusation around. Instead of accepting the role of the “Nazi” that Moscow assigned to it, Ukraine pointed the comparison back at the Kremlin: the leader actually sending tanks across a neighbour’s border, the image suggested, was the one behaving like Hitler.
This kind of reversal is a common move in political cartooning. It does not try to prove anything in detail. It takes a charge made by an opponent and hands it back, using the most recognisable villain of the twentieth century as shorthand.
The Sudetenland analogy and Nancy Pelosi’s remark
The comparison most often drawn in early 2022 was not with the Second World War as a whole but with one specific episode: the Sudetenland. In September 1938, under the Munich Agreement, Britain, France and Italy accepted Nazi Germany’s annexation of this border region of Czechoslovakia, home to about three million people, most of them ethnic Germans. Czechoslovakia itself was not at the table. Hitler had justified his demands by claiming to protect those German speakers.
Six months later, in March 1939, Germany occupied the rest of Czech territory, breaking the promise made at Munich. Ever since, “Munich” has served as a byword for the danger of appeasing an expansionist leader in the hope that one concession will satisfy him.
The parallel many commentators saw in 2022 was Putin’s claim to be protecting Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, together with his recognition of the breakaway regions just before the invasion. Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the US House of Representatives, made the link explicit when describing the mood at the Munich Security Conference that February. As reported by The Times of Israel, she said: “This is the Sudetenland — that’s what people were saying there.”
Fittingly or not, the conference where people were drawing this comparison takes place in the same city where the 1938 agreement was signed.
Hitler comparisons at protests before the invasion
The cartoon did not appear out of nowhere. In the week before 24 February, demonstrators in several European cities carried placards and posters that set Putin’s face beside Hitler’s or merged the two. The Times of Israel’s report on the tweet included a photograph from a pro-Ukraine rally in Prague on 22 February 2022, where a protester held a sign drawing exactly that comparison.
Prague is a telling location. For Czechs, the Munich Agreement is part of national memory, the moment their country was carved up by larger powers without being consulted. Seeing Ukraine threatened in a similar way gave the analogy a personal weight in Central Europe that it may not have carried elsewhere.
What a historical analogy can and cannot do
Analogies to Hitler are powerful because almost everyone recognises the reference. That same power is their weakness. A cartoon can say “this looks like that” in a second, but it cannot show where the two situations differ, and it invites the reader to stop thinking once the emotional point lands.
Some useful questions to ask when you meet a comparison like this:
- Which part is being compared? The 2022 comparisons mostly concerned a leader using a neighbouring minority as a pretext to seize territory, not the Holocaust or the whole of Nazi ideology.
- Who is making it, and why? A government under invasion has an obvious interest in rallying support. That does not make its point wrong, but it is part of the context.
- Does the evidence beyond the image support it? In this case, the facts of the invasion itself, the recognition of the separatist regions and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 are well documented and are what gave the analogy its force.
- Is it being used to shut down discussion? Comparisons with Hitler are so common online that they can become a reflex. They work best when tied to a specific, checkable parallel, as the Sudetenland comparison was.
Political cartoons are opinion, in the same way an editorial is. Read as such, the @Ukraine image is a clear record of how Ukraine chose to frame the war on its first day.
Why the image still matters
Looking back, the cartoon is a small but revealing piece of the information war that began alongside the fighting. Russia framed its attack as a campaign against Nazism; Ukraine replied, within hours, by casting Russia’s leader as Hitler’s heir. Both sides were reaching for the memory of the Second World War, which still carries enormous moral weight in Eastern Europe, where it killed tens of millions.
The titles and quotes in this piece belong to February 2022. Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House at the time, and the remarks quoted here were made in the context of the days just before and after the invasion began. The war itself, and the debate about how to describe it, continued long after the tweet was posted.
Sources: The Times of Israel: Ukraine tweets caricature showing Hitler giving his approval to Putin; @Ukraine on Twitter, 24 February 2022; Wikipedia: Russian invasion of Ukraine; Wikipedia: Munich Agreement.
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