Last Veteran of WWII Battle Group Marching Alone in Victory Day Parade

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About

Last Veteran of WWII Battle Group in Victory Day Parade refers to a photograph of an elderly veteran garbed in Russian military dress uniform wiping the tears from his eyes while marching down a street alongside a crowd of supporters. Since 2013, the photograph has gone viral on various social media platforms around the world, typically with the caption describing the man as the last surviving World War II veteran of his battlegroup marching alone at a commemorative parade.

Origin

The photograph is said to have been circulating the Russian web for several years, typically resurging during the days leading up to and after Victory Day on May 9th, before it gained international fame through the grapevines of social media.

According to BBC Trending's investigation, the image was originally taken by photographer Aleksandr Petrosyan^[1] on Nevsky Prospekt during the 2007 Victory Day parade in St. Petersburg, Russia. While Petrosyan recalls having taken the photograph of the crying veteran on that day, he stated that he did not speak to him person and the identity of the man remains unknown.

Spread

On May 8th, 2013, the photograph was submitted to Reddit's /r/pics^[2], where it gained 2,862 votes prior to being archived. On May 9th, 2015, which marked the 60th anniversary of Victory Day in Russia, the photograph was submitted to /r/pics^[3] for the second time, accruing 4,550 votes before its archival. On April 1st, 2016, the Facebook page^[4] for English-language news site HypeDojo posted a captioned version of the photograph. Within the first month, the post gained over 800,000 shares.

Due to the lack of biographical information about the man depicted in the image, many viewers from different countries of The Allies misinterpreted it as representing a veteran from their respective nations, including Great Britain, Australia and the United States. On April 16th, BBC Trending^[1] ran an article about the photograph titled "The mystery veteran who won the internet's heart," which identified one of the medals on his uniform as "The Order of the Patriotic War," a decoration given to those who served in the Soviet Army during World War II, citing the analysis of Dr. Igor Sutyagin, a Russian military expert at the UK's Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI).