Live Science Plus
Why did Russian cosmonauts wear Ukraine-flag colors?
The answer seems to be changing.
Three cosmonauts boarded the International Space Station on Friday (March 18) donning bright-yellow and blue flight suits, with some likening the fashion choice to the Russian trio's support of Ukraine. Now, the Russian space agency has not only denied but ridiculed that interpretation.
"Sometimes yellow is just yellow," Roscosmos' press service said on its Telegram channel, Reuters reported.
The three cosmonauts, Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov, docked their Soyuz MS-21 spacecraft with the space station, and joined seven crewmates already onboard on Friday.
On Saturday (March 19), the Russian space agency released a statement quoting Artemyev responding to questions about the Ukraine-flag color choice: "There is no need to look for any hidden signs or symbols in our uniform. A colour is simply a colour. It is not in any way connected to Ukraine. Otherwise, we would have to recognise its rights to the yellow sun in the blue sky," Artemyev said, as reported by The Guardian. "These days, even though we are in space, we are together with our president and our people!"
Related: Live science-related updates on Ukraine invasion
The director-general of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin reportedly went further, saying the cosmonauts had no sympathy for Ukrainian nationalists, Reuters reported.
Even so, on Friday, Artemyev had explained the color choice with a different rationale, saying the team chose the bright yellow because there was so much of that material in storage, explaining "that's why we had to wear yellow," The Guardian reported.
Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.
The Ukrainian flag has always included yellow, but it has changed over the years. Ukraine adopted its first national flag in 1848; revolutionaries, who wanted the country's western entities to be freed from Austro-Hungarian rule, chose the colors based on the coat of arms of Lviv — the largest city in Western Ukraine, according to Britannica. The coat of arms showed a golden lion over a blue shield and at the time, the flag showed horizontal stripes of yellow on top of blue. In January of 1918, the Ukrainian Republic declared its independence, and later that year the republic adopted a new flag, this one with reversed stripes to symbolize "blue skies over golden wheat fields," Britannica said.
The flag went through other iterations, at one point in 1949 showing the Red Banner of the Soviet Union with a horizontal light-blue stripe added to the bottom. Once Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union, the country brought the nationalist blue-yellow banner into existence on Jan. 28, 1992, Britannica reported.
Originally published on Live Science.
Jeanna Bryner is managing editor of Scientific American. Previously she was editor in chief of Live Science and, prior to that, an editor at Scholastic's Science World magazine. Bryner has an English degree from Salisbury University, a master's degree in biogeochemistry and environmental sciences from the University of Maryland and a graduate science journalism degree from New York University. She has worked as a biologist in Florida, where she monitored wetlands and did field surveys for endangered species, including the gorgeous Florida Scrub Jay. She also received an ocean sciences journalism fellowship from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She is a firm believer that science is for everyone and that just about everything can be viewed through the lens of science.