A Free Archive of the Very Best Pro-Ukraine Memes
More than any modern military conflict, the war in Europe underscores that public perception and even—to a degree—troop morale is tied to mass media. So memes can matter. This meme bank explores that.
{Note: This rapidly expanding meme library is a work in progress. It will continue to grow until every Russian soldier has departed every inch of Ukrainian soil, and all Ukraine is securely in the hands of the Ukrainian government and its loyal citizens. Note also that all meme images have a number beneath them, so you can direct other social media users to the images you believe are most effective and keep a tally yourself of which you like to use. To use a meme, either retweet any Twitter video/GIF here or right-click to download an image. Slava Ukraini!}
Introduction
Memes don’t move military conflicts. But they can influence public perception of how a conflict is unfolding—and that, in turn, can alter the appetite a nation and its allies have for the continuation of that conflict. Memes can even, at the margins, hearten (or dishearten) some soldiers.
At this point in the horrifically bloody war in Europe, a “war of choice” (also known as “unilateral aggression” or a “war crime”) initiated by Donald Trump’s erstwhile political ally Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin—a war Ukraine neither asked for nor in any way deserved; a war marked by systematic war crimes by Russia—it’s clear that the once-respected Russian army is demoralized, under-supplied, poorly led, and, in a word, losing.
This is attributable to Ukrainian bravery, tactics, and skill on the field of combat—and to a lesser degree, but still importantly, to equipment supplied to Ukrainian forces by their allies in Europe and North America.
There is also some evidence to suggest that Ukrainian resolve has been bolstered not only by its successes on the battlefield but its obvious—and, it must be said, equally numerous and stunning—victories in the public relations war that’s run concurrent to the military conflict itself. This daily public relations tilt comprises public interviews with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, formal messaging by the Ukrainian government and military and their allies, and, yes, to some extent at least, by memes.
For this reason, Proof has begun building an archive of the best pro-Ukraine memes.
Is this meme library or meme bank merely for a lark? Absolutely not. The idea here is that these memes are very powerful pro-Ukraine messaging which, taken in sum, can transform public perception by correctly positioning Ukraine’s defenders as David-like heroes and Putin and his Kremlin sycophants as Goliath-like brutes. (It is more difficult to know how to think about Russian soldiers themselves, as so many have committed war crimes even as others have recorded videos tearfully admitting that they do not want to be in Ukraine and bear the Ukrainians no ill will—confirming that this really is Putin’s war, and was launched on the strength of years of lies told by him to the Russian people, a botched and thoroughly immoral mass mobilization of Russian men with no training or desire to die for Putin’s sociopathic adventurism in Europe, and the utter bewilderment of one of the world’s strongest militaries setting its troops up for mass slaughter through poor planning, provisioning and leadership).
It is never a bad thing—if you love freedom, want the very best for Europe and NATO and the European Union and Western-style democracies—to spread pro-Ukraine memes on social media. So hopefully Proof readers will feel moved to use the memes catalogued below often and enthusiastically. These memes can be particularly effective whenever there is news, as there so often is now, of Ukrainian victories, Russian mass surrenders, and shifts in territorial holdings that advantage and redound to the glory of Ukraine’s increasingly mythos-worthy armed forces.
Needless to say, none of this is aimed at glorifying war. As noted above, no one but Putin wanted this war, unless you count the legions of pro-Kremlin Republicans in the United States who have divested themselves of all they ever believed in or at least claimed to believe in (e.g., freedom, democracy, the West, anti-fascism, and human rights) to kneel at the twin, blood-covered altars of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
How Proof Comes to the Idea of Meme Warfare
As many Proof readers know, I have taught digital culture—including memes—at both University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of New Hampshire, in addition to for years authoring an IndieWire column (“Metamericana”) that dealt in part with memes and having written three national bestsellers that deal significantly with the recent history of Russia and Ukraine: Proof of Collusion (Simon & Schuster, 2018); Proof of Conspiracy (Macmillan, 2019); and Proof of Corruption (Macmillan, 2020). I’ve also spent much time thinking, writing, and teaching about a sometimes-controversial concept known as “meme magic”.
Meme magic is simply the idea that memes have sufficient authority, influence, and currency in digital culture that they can indirectly effectuate changes in “meatspace” and even—this being the controversial part—mainstream and reify notions that are at present just ideational, theoretical, or even fantastical. As with anything, meme magic can be used responsibly or abused; it can be instrumentalized by the unscrupulous or the just. There can be no doubt that the broader cause of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the current war in Ukraine (2014-present) is a just one (howsoever there will often be malfeasance in wartime that ill reflects the ideals of even those parties whose causes are just, which conduct must be punished at the earliest practicable moment).
All of this is to say that the archive below has been carefully curated by a journalist and professor and cultural theorist with substantial experience with memes. While many of the memes below are necessarily NSFW, no memes will appear here that gratuitously celebrate specific instances of bloodshed, make light of the horrors of war, or seek to in any way dehumanize (in the literal sense of that term) any person or group of people.
I’m of Russian descent—albeit Russian Jewish descent; my forebears were hounded out of Russia following bloody pogroms—and before and during my English doctorate at University of Wisconsin-Madison I was a lover of Russian literature and culture. While I believe many Russians bear responsibility for enabling Putin (in the same way that many Americans bear responsibility for enabling Trump) I believe the Russian people as a whole, like Americans as a whole, are generally a good people who’ve been cynically, persistently, and professionally lied to by their most unscrupulous leaders.
The focus of the memes below is therefore Putin, the Kremlin, Russian warhawks (the so-called “Z” culture of the Russian invaders), pro-invasion Westerners, the Russian military-industrial complex, Kremlin client or vassal states that have collaborated with Russia in its recent war crimes (e.g., Belarus), pro-Putin propagandists, the anti-Democratic (MAGA) bulk of the 2022 Republican Party in America, Russia’s oligarch class (which implicitly and sometimes explicitly helps maintain Putin’s power base), and other similarly sinister forces. Proof doesn’t feel or endorse a generalized animus toward the Russian people.
The Pro-Ukraine Meme Library
Table of Contents
Part I: Videos
Use: click on these to open the tweet in question, which can then be retweeted.
Part II: Images
Use: right-click on these to download them, then post them anywhere on social media.
Part III: GIFs
Use: click on these to open the tweet in question, which can then be retweeted.
Feel free to share any of the memes below wherever you are able to share them. And keep in mind that the rallying cry for Ukraine’s soldiers, which is often useful as an accompaniment to any memes you post on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram, is “Slava Ukraini!” This means “Glory to Ukraine!” Read more about this salute here.
{Note: Many of the memes below contain violent images and strong language. Also, please note that though a few of the memes below are marked as being from the Ukrainian Memes Forces or UMF, which you can find on Twitter at @uamemesforces, Proof doesn’t wholesale recommend this Twitter account because many of the memes found there (a) are particularly focused on a European rather than American audience, (b) require a level of knowledge of the goings-on in Ukraine that most Americans don’t have and are therefore less likely to respond to (particularly as compared to the memes archived here), and (c) vary wildly in quality. Proof has endeavored to bring the very best UMF memes here; all such memes are explicitly marked. Just so, there are a few memes here from the much-discussed NAFO or North Atlantic Fellas Organization; the reason there aren’t more such memes is that these memes generally rely on Shiba Inu iconography, this being an iconography that largely has purchase in crypto circles. Another pro-Ukraine meme-based Twitter account many will have heard of is @SaintJavelin.}
Part I: Videos
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Part II: Images
Part III: GIFs
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Conclusion
There’s little most of us can do to in even an infinitesimal way influence the outcome of the war in Europe—which is arguably (it says here at Proof, and similarly elsewhere) a WWIII America is already part of. This said, Americans aren’t entirely powerless. We can:
Vote for Democratic Party candidates in the November 2022 national elections, as the GOP has been overtaken by a MAGA cult that categorically prefers Russia to Europe and authoritarianism at home and abroad to democracy anywere;
send money to Democratic Party candidates in tightly contested 2022 races;
send money to responsible relief organizations that are aiding civilians affected by the war in Europe (including the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of newly displaced Ukrainian refugees, both transnational and in-country); and
talk to our friends, neighbors, and social-media acquaintances about how the war in Europe not only affects international order, world peace, global markets, and the promise of every burgeoning democracy on Earth, but will intimately inform the future of global energy use, the standing of human rights in countries around the world, and (with great specificity) the future of NATO, the European Union, and American diplomatic and economic and military power on the world stage.
But we can also do something else—and while it’s a much smaller and less important thing, it’s something we ought to do anyway if we’re going to spend any time each day on social media. We can up our meme game. Why post some confusing, out-of-focus, ill-conceived, rhetorically ineffective, emotionally inert, syntactically sloppy, poorly cropped, inadvertently offensive, iconographically obtuse, and minimally persuasive meme addressing Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine when you can post a high-quality meme instead? For that matter, why try to sift through thousands of mediocre memes, when you do choose to meme, rather than use a carefully curated meme library?
So while this Proof meme library (or meme bank) certainly isn’t some ground-breaking project, it does give civilians a chance to be effective digital adjuncts to a war effort that they can’t participate in directly. I hope the videos, images, and GIFs above will be understood—and used—in this context.
These are all great !!
I like that you added the cat knocking them off the table 💜
What a great resource! Thanks, Seth, for everything you do !