It was a tiny victory amid a colossal human tragedy, and we may have run this image before, but it is priceless, and it resurfaced just as Vladimir Putin was entering Ukraine. It first appeared on a poster in 2013 as part of an unsuccessful effort to derail Putin’s “anti-gay propaganda” law—Russia’s version of “Don’t say gay”—and it did its job by really getting under his skin, so much so that in 2017 he banned the image for presenting “alleged nonstandard sexual orientation of the president of the Russian Federation.” In the recent incident, hackers took over Bulgarian media, targeting the largest broadcasters, which are allowed to stream content inside Russia. The hackers gained control of these sites for twenty minutes, during which they displayed the image and the words “make love, not war.” Our only purpose here is to reprint the send-up one more time, just because Putin hates it so much.
