The behavior of OptionMenu in Tkinter is weird

Question

I want to add icons to the options in the dropdown menu. I implemented this using OptionMenu in Tkinter. The problem is that these icons are not displayed properly.

This is part of my code:

class DropDownMenu(tk.OptionMenu):
    def __init__(self, parent):

        self.curr_value = tk.StringVar()

        options_image, save_image, remove_image, replace_image = self.load_icons()
        actions_and_images = {"Зберегти копію": save_image, "Видалити": remove_image, "Замінити": replace_image}

        super().__init__(parent, self.curr_value, "", *list(actions_and_images.keys()))
        #self.config(image=options_image)

        for option, image in actions_and_images.items():
            self['menu'].entryconfigure(option, image=image, compound="left")


    def load_icons(self):
        options_icon = Image.open("./icons/options_icon.png").resize((25, 25))
        options_image = ImageTk.PhotoImage(options_icon, )

        save_icon = Image.open("./icons/save_icon.png").resize((25, 25))
        save_image = ImageTk.PhotoImage(save_icon)

        remove_icon = Image.open("./icons/remove_icon.png").resize((25, 25))
        remove_image = ImageTk.PhotoImage(remove_icon)

        replace_icon = Image.open("./icons/replace icon.png").resize((25, 25))
        replace_image = ImageTk.PhotoImage(replace_icon)

        return options_image, save_image, remove_image, replace_image

But when running the program, the icons are not displayed.

However, if you run the program in debug mode with a breakpoint on the line where the icons are added to the options, surprisingly it works.

enter image description here

The question is why this happens and how can I fix the code so that I don't have to do this hack every time.