
Three cosmonauts boarded the International Space Station on Friday (March 18) donning bright-yellow and blue flight fits, with some likening the style option to the Russian trio’s assist of Ukraine. Now, the Russian area company has not solely denied however ridiculed that interpretation.
“Sometimes yellow is just yellow,” Roscosmos’ press service stated on its Telegram channel, Reuters reported.
The three cosmonauts, Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov, docked their Soyuz MS-21 spacecraft with the area station, and joined seven crewmates already onboard on Friday.
On Saturday (March 19), the Russian area company launched an announcement quoting Artemyev responding to questions concerning the Ukraine-flag shade selection: “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 stated, as reported by The Guardian. “These days, even though we are in space, we are together with our president and our people!”
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The director-general of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin reportedly went additional, saying the cosmonauts had no sympathy for Ukrainian nationalists, Reuters reported.
Even so, on Friday, Artemyev had defined the colour selection with a special rationale, saying the group selected the intense yellow as a result of there was a lot of that materials in storage, explaining “that’s why we had to wear yellow,” The Guardian reported.
The Ukrainian flag has at all times included yellow, nevertheless it has modified through the years. Ukraine adopted its first nationwide flag in 1848; revolutionaries, who needed the nation’s western entities to be free of Austro-Hungarian rule, selected the colours based mostly on the coat of arms of Lviv — the biggest metropolis in Western Ukraine, according to Britannica. The coat of arms confirmed a golden lion over a blue protect and on the time, the flag confirmed horizontal stripes of yellow on prime of blue. In January of 1918, the Ukrainian Republic declared its independence, and later that 12 months the republic adopted a brand new flag, this one with reversed stripes to represent “blue skies over golden wheat fields,” Britannica stated.
The flag went by means of different iterations, at one level in 1949 exhibiting the Red Banner of the Soviet Union with a horizontal light-blue stripe added to the underside. Once Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union, the nation introduced the nationalist blue-yellow banner into existence on Jan. 28, 1992, Britannica reported.
Originally printed on Live Science.