In Vladimir Oblast, a court has dropped a defamation case over a photo collage featuring SS symbols and “SMO.”

The Yuryev-Polsky District Court has dropped the criminal case of defamation against local resident Ilya Petrov, reports “Dovod.”

The prosecution was prompted by a satirical photo collage on VKontakte that depicted pro-war activist Sergei Trubkin in a Wehrmacht uniform. The collage originally included Nazi SS symbols, which were later replaced with “SVO” symbols—Z and V letters.

Petrov received the image from an acquaintance in Ukraine. In 2023, a magistrate’s court found him guilty of defamation and fined him 60,000 rubles (about US$700). The district court subsequently overturned the verdict, and after several rounds of further investigation the case was dropped in November 2025 by decision of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, due to lack of evidence of a crime.

According to investigators, Petrov was expressing an opinion rather than making statements of fact. Police also stated that neither Petrov nor the author of the collage intended “to equate Nazi symbols with ‘SVO’ symbols.” The Ministry of Internal Affairs added that “the Z and V symbols are not official military designations and do not carry any special meaning.”