RIA Novosti reporter covering Ukraine War has fascist tattoos, Ukrainian journalists find out 

Gleb Erve, a Russian reporter with RIA Novosti, who is currently in Ukraine and covers the war events, has Nazi and fascist symbols tattooed on his body, a Ukrainian Telegram channel finds out.

Erve owns a public (non-private) Instagram account where he posts photos of himself. Several photos reveal he has far-right tattoos, including the logo of Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party and an Algiz, a rune from the Elder Futhark runic alphabet which was appropriated by the German Nazis in the 1930s.

Erve’s Instagram also shows he used to work in a tattoo shop alongside Andrey Dedov, an associate of Maxim Martsinkevich a.k.a Tesak, a now-deceased Russian nazi activist popular in the early 2010s. Dedov might be connected to a string of murders, Baza and NEWS.ru say. He is now hiding in Ukraine despite the fact that he is included in the Myrotvorets list, a Ukrainian website that publishes personal information of people who are considered to be "enemies of Ukraine.”

Erve claims he did not finish college because he used to “hunt paedophiles” with his associates. Rustam Yulbarisov, an antifa journalist, says Erve used to be a far-right activist in Tomsk where he “was associated with Restruct and Occupy Paedophilia”, organisations founded by Martsinkevich.

Erve has a number of highlighted (permanently available) Stories on his Instagram account where he answers his followers’ questions regarding his beliefs. This is what he wrote when asked about his view on the Ukraine War: “I understand Russia’s stance, although I do not want Ukraine to become yet another Moscow’s colony.” He was also asked if he had many like-minded fellows, to which he replied with a photo of a rally in support of the murdered activists from the Italian Social Movement, a neo-fascist political party, taken in 1978.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin started a “special military operation to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine” on 24 February. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, later clarified that Ukraine needs to be “cleared of nazi-minded people.”

The Kremlin set up phone polls to check how Russians perceive propaganda shortly after the war started. They found out that Russians mostly do not understand what ‘denazification’ means and decided to cut down on using this word in TV propaganda, Proekt cites four sources in the Kremlin. 

Nonetheless, Russian officials keep on using the collocation “Ukrainian nazis” when they referred to the Ukrainian army, civilians, or even refugees forced to come to Russia via escape corridors.