Russian President Vladimir Putin plunged the world into a new shock wave with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While the images we watched on TV showed the terrible face of the war once again, we also saw that Russian military vehicles were marked with Z symbols.
The invasion hadn’t even begun when Rob Lee, a doctoral student focusing on Russian defense policy, first saw these signs. “This is a giant red flag,” Lee said on Twitter. “These are Rosgvardia troops and Avtozaks (prisoner transport) vehicles. A strong sign that Rosgvardia troops will take part in the invasion.” The Russian National Guard, or Rosgvardia, is separate from the Russian Armed Forces as a group accountable only to President Putin.
The many videos and images shared on Twitter allow us to see almost all of the vehicles carrying different symbols. Painted symbols like these are often applied to vehicles entering combat soon, Sky News said, so Z symbols could be indicative of the Russian military’s plans. Reports point to roughly 10 different symbol types, not just a simple Z: Some are just a straight Z, others are enclosed in boxes or triangles.
As for the meanings of the symbols… It is speculated that it may serve as a means of avoiding friendly fire, or as a means of transmitting strategic offensive means for this vehicle, making it easier for Russian soldiers to identify Russian vehicles.
According to Professor Michael Clarke, former director of the defense research center RUSI, in a conversation with Sky News, “These symbols will often be location-based – they’ll report where a unit is going. If they just marked vehicles as Russian, a single symbol could be used. The fact that they’re different tells you more – they’re probably markings that tell you which units are heading northeast or northwest of a region.”
However, it is not clear exactly what these symbols mean, and we probably won’t know for a long time.
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