Blue Over Yellow: The 144-Year Fight to Fly Ukraine's Flag
Julio Song · · 9 min read
On 22 July 1976, at the Montreal Olympics, Liubomyr Shukh waved a blue and yellow flag at a handball match. He was removed from the match. Five days later, Danylo Myhal ran onto the pitch during the East Germany against USSR football semi-final with the same flag. Police removed him after about 15 seconds. Ukrinform's history of the flag records both moments.
Why would two men risk arrest for a pair of stripes? Because by 1976 those stripes had been fighting for official status for 128 years. They would need 16 more. The design is two horizontal stripes. Getting it onto a flagpole legally took 144 years.
A lion, a town hall and one week in June
The story starts in Lviv, which in 1848 was Lemberg, a provincial capital of the Austrian Empire. That spring, revolutions broke out across Europe, and the Ukrainians of Galicia (then called Ruthenians) formed a political body of their own, the Supreme Ruthenian Council. It met at St. George's Cathedral, with Bishop Hryhoriy Yakhymovych at its head.
The council needed colours, and it found them in heraldry. The old arms of the Galician-Volhynian state showed a golden lion on a blue field. A council commission declared those the "Ruthenian colours," as Radio Svoboda's account of the 1848 flag explains. The council's own wording put it plainly: "the colors of Ruthenia are yellow and blue."
On 25 June 1848, a blue and yellow flag appeared on Lviv's town hall. Nobody signed for it. The local newspaper reported the hoisting without naming anyone, and both the Austrian authorities and the council itself distanced themselves from it. The flag hung there for almost a week.
The council took the lawful route the next year. It petitioned the Austrian authorities, and in 1849 the flag flew officially beside the Austrian colours. It stayed up for one day.
Those early flags had no fixed order. Radio Svoboda notes that some put blue on top and others put yellow on top. Nobody thought it mattered yet. It would matter a great deal later.
Which way up?
The next chance came with the collapse of the Russian Empire. On 16 March 1917, blue and yellow flags appeared in public in Kyiv, Odesa and Kharkiv, according to Ukrinform. The next day, the Central Council of Ukraine was announced, and the colour order became a practical question.
Historian Andriy Hrechylo, head of the Ukrainian Heraldic Society, went through the documents of that period in a 2014 study for Istorychna Pravda. He found both orders in use in 1917. Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who chaired the Central Rada, described the flags as blue-yellow in his memoirs, but he also cracked a joke about "yellow-blue."
Hrechylo points to 27 January 1918 as the date the order was first written down. That day the Central Rada passed a temporary law on the navy, and it described the flag as blue and yellow, in that sequence. A popular story says a law of 22 March 1918 made the flag yellow over blue. Hrechylo calls that unfounded. What Hrushevsky put before the Little Rada on that date were designs for a coat of arms and seal by the artist Vasyl Krychevsky.
Then came the claim that Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, who led the Ukrainian State for part of 1918, turned the flag upside down. Hrechylo checked that too. On 16 July 1918, Skoropadsky approved a new naval flag with the national flag in the canton, and that canton showed blue over yellow. In Hrechylo's words, he "did not flip anything."
The West Ukrainian People's Republic, declared in November 1918, used the same blue-over-yellow order, Wikipedia's history of the flag notes. Carpatho-Ukraine adopted the blue and yellow bicolour in March 1939 and, Ukrinform notes, fought under it from 15 March until late May that year.
Red, with a strip of azure
Soviet rule ended all of this. Under the Soviet system, the blue and yellow flag became contraband. Displaying it, Wikipedia's history notes, was grounds for prosecution for "anti-Soviet propaganda."
The Ukrainian SSR had its own flag, and for decades it was red with small lettering, close to identical to the flag of the USSR itself. That became awkward after 1945, when Ukraine and Byelorussia took their own seats at the United Nations. On 21 November 1949, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR decreed a new flag: red across the top two thirds, an azure stripe across the bottom third, and the gold star with hammer and sickle in the corner.
Look at that flag and you'll find blue on it, at the bottom, under a field of red twice its height. Make of that what you will.
People kept the real flag alive anyway, and they paid for it. On the night of 1 May 1966, two men, Viktor Kuksa and Heorhiy Moskalenko, raised the blue and yellow over the Kyiv Institute of National Economy. Both went to prison. The flag turned up on the central avenue of Dnipropetrovsk on 30 December 1967 and on a roof on Kyiv's Khreshchatyk in February 1976, Ukrinform records. Five months after that came Montreal.
Spring 1990, one town at a time
The ban did not end with a single decree from Moscow. It ended town by town, as local councils decided they'd had enough.
The first crack came in Lviv on 26 April 1989, at a rally marking three years since Chornobyl. Yuri Voloshchak raised a blue and yellow flag openly in Rynok Square, the market square around the same town hall where the flag had hung in 1848. Halia Dmytryshyn had sewn it, with a golden trident added.
A year later, elected councils started to act. Wikipedia's account, which draws on Ukrainian press reports, gives the sequence:
- 14 March 1990: the flag was raised in Stryi, its first raising since the Soviet Union was established.
- 20 March 1990: Ternopil's town council voted to restore the yellow and blue flag.
- 28 April 1990: the Lviv oblast council allowed national symbols across the whole region.
- 29 April 1990: the flag flew from the Ternopil city theatre flagstaff with no Soviet flag above it.
- 24 July 1990: the flag went up outside the Kyiv City Council, the first official government building to fly it.
Notice the detail in Ternopil in April. Nothing flew above the blue and yellow. To anyone who reads flagpoles, that was a statement of who outranked whom.
Kyiv still marks 24 July as a local flag day. After that, events moved fast. Ukraine declared independence on 24 August 1991, and the blue and yellow flag was carried into the hall of the Verkhovna Rada. On 4 September 1991, it flew over the parliament building for the first time.
Even then, the paperwork lagged. The red-and-azure Soviet flag stayed the legal state flag. Flags of the World notes that provisional legislation that September had the two flags hoisted side by side. A Presidium decree, No. 1567-XII of 18 September 1991, allowed the blue and yellow flag at official ceremonies until a constitution was adopted. The temporary version used proportions of 1:2, the same as the Soviet flag it stood next to.
28 January 1992
The decision came four months later. On 28 January 1992, the Verkhovna Rada adopted decree No. 2067-XII, "About the State Flag of Ukraine." Flags of the World cites Hrechylo, who calls this the definitive adoption date and dismisses the other dates sometimes quoted. The proportions moved to 2:3. UNIAN marked the 25th anniversary of that decision in 2017.
The constitution followed. Ukraine adopted it on 28 June 1996, Flags of the World records, and Article 20 defines the flag in a single line: "a banner of two equally-sized horizontal bands of blue and yellow." After 148 years of argument, that's the entire legal description.
The colours got a technical standard in 2006. DSTU 4512:2006 sets the blue at Pantone 2935 C and the yellow at Pantone 012 C. On screen, that's roughly RGB 0, 87, 183 for the blue and 255, 215, 0 for the yellow. Hrechylo is on record that darker or lighter shades carry no political meaning, so the cheap flag in your local hardware shop is no act of rebellion.
In August 2004, President Leonid Kuchma signed a decree creating National Flag Day, held every 23 August, as UNIAN reported.
The upside-down argument that won't go away
You'd think a constitutional clause would settle the order for good. It hasn't.
Many Ukrainians still call it the "yellow and light blue" flag, which lists the colours the other way round. Some nationalist groups promote a yellow-over-blue flag as the "true" Ukrainian flag and say it has 19th-century roots, Flags of the World reports. One reading sees yellow on top for church cupolas and blue below for the Dnieper. The argument has run since 1918. In 1949, diaspora organisations agreed to fly blue over yellow until an independent Ukraine made its own choice. Ukraine chose in 1992. Parts of the argument carried on anyway.
Hrechylo's 2014 study takes the inversion case apart claim by claim. The "heraldic rules" behind the case come from 19th-century German recommendations, and plenty of national flags ignore them. Readings based on the I Ching or feng shui have nothing to do with vexillology. And the idea that an upside-down flag signals distress comes from a US flag-code rule and a 2001 film, not from any Ukrainian tradition.
He notes one country does write an inverted flag into law. The Philippines flies its flag red side up in wartime. Ukraine has no such rule, and the people who want it flipped are not asking for a war flag.
His conclusion is blunt. He found no historical, heraldic or vexillological basis for turning the flag over.
Back to Montreal
Go back to that handball match in 1976. The flag Liubomyr Shukh held up had no state, no standard and no legal existence. Sixteen years later, the Rada passed a decree describing the same two stripes, and four years after that the constitution gave them one sentence.
Little about the design changed along the way. The ratio moved from 1:2 to 2:3. The blue settled on top, where the 1918 navy law had put it. The colours still come from a lion on a shield in medieval Galicia.
What changed was who was allowed to raise it. In 1848 nobody admitted to hanging it on the Lviv town hall. In 1966 the men who raised it in Kyiv went to prison. In 1990 Ternopil's council voted for it in public, and weeks later it flew there with nothing above it. When you see that flag on a building today, you're looking at the outcome of that vote, repeated in Stryi, Lviv and Kyiv until the Rada wrote it into law.
Julio Song
Writer
Julio is a staff writer at FlagDB. He studied Mathematics at the University of Madrid and has a passion for vexillology.
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