A Story of the Hijacking a Russian tank: Reception and Artistic Depiction

One most vivid piece of news at the very onset of the Russian full-scale invasion featured a story about Roma people from the village of Liubymivka who ostensibly stole a Russian tank. On the 26th of February, 2022, an emotional post appeared on social networks, with a screenshot from a private chat attached to it. Next day this piece of new was already on air of the 1+1 TV Channel whose anchors reported that the incident took place in the village of Liubymivka, Kakhovka County, Kherson Province, where a huge community of Crimean Roma people lives (a subgroup of the Roma community).

That same day, Khuiovyi Kherson, a popular Telegram channel, published an updated description of the occurrence which asserted that the Roma people did not hijack the tank but instead dismantled it and rendered it inoperable, and that it was performed not only by Roma people but also by local Ukrainians who joined in the effort.

News of this event soon got viral and most popular on news platforms and over social networks in general. Polish President Andrzej Duda posted it on his Twitter page. The story of the tank became a topic for numerous patriotic songs, memes, animations, retail goods, comedy shows and jokes actively disseminated over social networks, including pages that were run by Ukrainian Armed Forces. The phrase ‘The Gypsies have stolen a tank’ became a popular online meme.

As we tried to verify all the details of this event, we had many questions. Truth be told, verification of such information in wartime, as the village was under occupation, was all but impossible. Besides, posting such information might endanger the safety of people involved. That said, the wide publicity this event received in global media was a fact. This incident became one of the most widely covered Roma-related events in Russia’s war against Ukraine. The Pershyi Zakhidnyi (‘First Western’) TV Channel even interviewed Borys Oglu, a Crimean Rom, who confirmed that his relatives from Kherson Province were involved in the hijacking of the Russian tank: «One of the Roms, an elderly guy, knew how to fill the tank with fuel, so they did so, drove it home, and then took it apart into scrap iron pieces. The whole thing weighed about 45 metric tonnes».

The story of hijacking of a Russian tank in Ukraine soon became world news which reached audiences way beyond Ukraine and became very popular in Poland, Slovakia, Romania, and Moldova. This incident soon became a global mega-event. And regardless of the fact that this event took place almost three years ago, it is still being recounted in various formats. And so this story became the basis for a theatrical play created by Kherson Theatre Lab who teamed up with Romano Than Roma Cultural Centre. Their theatrical performance is on tour all across Europe and has already been shown in Berlin, Germersheim, and on the 15th of December, 2024, and was first presented in Lviv, Ukraine.

Mykola Homaniuk, Director, teamed up with actors—Janusz Panchenko, Nelia Kokul, Mykola Bielashev, Danylo Kokul—are trying to find out if the Romani did in fact steal that Russian tank, or was that sort of an urban legend. The performance also draws attention to the question why did this story get so much publicity worldwide, and how did it impact the attitude towards Roma people. This cultural event is always of great interest to various audiences: German, Ukrainian, and Roma. The second part of the performance usually ends in a discussion between the creative team and the viewers whereby issues of Roma cultural identity and their role in the Russian-Ukrainian war are discussed.

The centrepiece event itself—that is, the hijacking of a Russian tank—is a sort of a modern-day interpretation of the popular story of a nail which a Roma smith nicked from Roman legionnaires (the nail they had intended to hammer into Christ’s head) wherein the image of Christ is reinterpreted as the image of Ukraine.

Photo: Performance in Germany

Co-authored with Mykola Homaniuk