Coca-Cola Briefly Decided That Crimea Is Part of Russia After All

Drinks firm Coca-Cola on Wednesday blamed a marketing agency for a map of Russia used in an online advertising campaign that first did not include Crimea, then got changed to show Crimea as part of Russia, sparking protests and threats of a boycott from angry Ukrainians.

Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in March 2014, leading to condemnation from Western governments which imposed sanctions on Russia in response. Only a handful of countries have recognized Crimea's incorporation into Russia.

The ad, published on a leading Russian social networking site VK, on December 30 as a new year's message, first included a map of Russia that didn't include Crimea. Following anger from Russian VK users, on Tuesday the map was changed to include Crimea, accompanied by an apology. The new map also included the Kuril Islands, the still-disputed western Pacific archipelago that Moscow seized in 1945 from Japan, reported the Guardian.

Related: Re-Education, 'Extremists,' and Blackouts: Inside Crimea One Year After Russian Annexation

Furious Ukrainians then took to social media to vent their anger against Coca-Cola, and some threatened to boycott the company's products.

Ukraine's embassy in the United States said in a statement on its Facebook page that it had expressed concerns to the company and to the US State Department.

"The embassy emphasized that Coca-Cola's actions violate the official US position condemning Russia's illegal occupation of Crimea, which is and has always been an integral part of Ukraine," the statement said.

A scandal erupts when — Hromadske Int. (@Hromadske)January 6, 2016

The company said that the map, which appeared on December 30 on Coca-Cola's VK page, had been changed by an advertising agency without Coca-Cola's approval.

In a statement on Wednesday, Coca-Cola said: "We, as a company, don't support any political movements. The company has removed the post and apologizes for the situation that occurred."

It's the second time in a month that a Coca-Cola advert has caused huge offense. A Coca-Cola Mexico ad had to be pulled from YouTube in December following outrage over what it showed — a group of pale-skinned and obviously affluent young people rolling into an indigenous town to build a Christmas tree for wide-eyed locals.

Related: Drug Addicts Are Dying in Crimea Because They Can't Get Therapy

Yet the drinks giant is not the only multinational company to have inadvertently faced embarrassment recently because of the festering tensions between Russians and Ukrainians.

Google said on Tuesday that problems experienced by some users in translating terms into Russian from Ukrainian using Google Translate were the result of errors in its automated algorithms, Russian agency RBC reported.

Earlier Ukrainian media had reported that the translation service was rendering "Russian Federation" as "Mordor", a region in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings which is ruled by the evil character Sauron, and "Russians" as "occupiers."