Netherlands issues stamp with soccer player shooting down MH17
The Netherlands’ national mail operator, PostNL, has printed stamps depicting a connection between the FIFA World Cup in Russia and the MH17 aviation catastrophe of 2014, Dutch News outlet NOS reports.
The stamp depicts a person kicking a ball so that it collides with a passenger plane. Below the image, the stamp reads “FIFA World Cup RUSSIA 2018”.
The stamps were ordered through PostNL’s website, where anyone can design and order stamps with a personalized image. The company confirmed that an order had been placed for ten of the stamps.
Post NL expressed regret that company had made and supplied an image “which may be offensive to some people”, but stressed that the person designing and ordering the stamp is solely responsible for its content. The terms and conditions stipulate that no images may contain offensive or political content, but the monitoring of orders is done visually, and is not infallible.
The picture on the stamp was drawn by Ukrainian artist Andriy Yermolenko. According to Unian.info, Yermolenko has also made a series of eight similar posters on the World Cup in Russia, through which he aims to depict the “bloody nature of the Russian regime”. He has made his posters freely available online for anyone to download and print.