Berlin police enforced an annual ban on Russian, Soviet and Belarusian state symbols at the city's three Soviet war memorials on Saturday, the second day of a forty-eight-hour order covering the Friday and Saturday Victory Day commemorations. Officers at Treptower Park removed flags, the orange-and-black St George ribbons that have become a symbol of Russia's war in Ukraine, and several banners bearing the letters V and Z, which the German interior ministry classifies as pro-war propaganda.
The order, which was first imposed in May 2022 in the months after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, also bans the public wearing of Russian or Soviet military uniforms, the playing of "Katyusha" and several other songs identified by the police as recruitment tools for the Russian armed forces, and the carrying of portraits of Russian generals or of Joseph Stalin. About six hundred officers were deployed across the three memorials at Treptower Park, Tiergarten and Schönholzer Heide.
The Russian embassy in Berlin issued a statement on Friday morning calling the ban "absurd and cynical", arguing that it desecrated the memory of the eighty thousand Red Army soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin and were buried at the three sites. The Belarusian embassy filed a similar diplomatic note on Saturday morning. The German foreign office, asked to respond, said that the ban was a public-order measure and "does not apply to mourning, to flowers, or to private commemoration".
A small Russian-speaking crowd of perhaps two hundred had gathered at Treptower by midday on Saturday, most of whom complied with the order. A handful of arrests were reported by the Berlin morning paper Der Tagesspiegel after a group of about a dozen demonstrators attempted to unfurl a Soviet naval ensign at the foot of the central Soviet soldier statue. Police said the arrests had been brief and that all those detained had been released without charge by mid-afternoon.
Mayor Kai Wegner, who declined to attend any of the official German wreath-laying events on Friday, said in a brief statement on Saturday morning that Berlin "honours the dead of the Red Army, and rejects the misuse of their memory by a regime that today wages a war of aggression in Ukraine". The Ukrainian ambassador to Germany Oleksii Makeiev laid a wreath at the Tiergarten memorial on Friday afternoon and posted a video of the gesture to his X account, where it had been viewed nine million times by Saturday lunchtime.