New and Updated Russian Narratives in Propaganda Concerning the Occupied Territories

Наратив російської пропаганди

06.10.2024, 12:37

Not long ago, on 30 September, the Kremlin regime marked a date of great symbolic importance to itself: on that day in 2022, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin signed with his puppets, whom he had installed to govern Ukraine’s occupied territories, a “historic agreement on the accession of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts to the Russian Federation.”

At the same time, the leader of the aggressor state is not embarrassed even now by the fact that the Russian army has still not fully occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts. These regions were written into the Russian constitution as “territory of the Russian Federation” and since then Russian propaganda has called them “new regions” or “historical lands” that allegedly “voluntarily reunited with the Russian Federation following a referendum” — much like the one held more than a decade ago in occupied Crimea, already under the control of the Russian army.

Thus, in the Russian kingdom of crooked mirrors, the liberation of Kherson in autumn 2022 after several months of Russian captivity was described as the “Ukrainian occupation of an ancient Russian city.” Meanwhile, a separate forecast for Russia’s “new territories” issued by the Russian hydrometeorological centre cynically lists, alongside de-occupied Kherson, Zaporizhzhia — a city that has suffered from large-scale Russian shelling for the third year in a row but which the occupiers have never reached throughout the entire period of the full-scale invasion. And, God willing, they never will.

Nevertheless, the Crimean “authorities” and media controlled by the occupiers pay considerable attention to covering life in the “new territories,” especially in Putin’s so-called “Novorossiya” — that is, in the occupied parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. Moreover, they claim to provide “assistance, support and the establishment of peaceful life” in these territories. Yet even a superficial analysis of news from the occupied Crimean Peninsula clearly shows that after more than a decade of occupation, Crimea itself has no shortage of problems requiring urgent solutions on the ground.

However, the appointees of Putin’s regime are not particularly concerned with social protection, timely access to qualified medical care, the state of housing and communal services or similar matters. Their priority is to involve as many residents of the occupied region as possible in the “special military operation” against Ukraine. Here, in addition to financial payments from the local “authorities” equal to Putin’s 400,000 roubles — a total of 800,000 roubles or approximately 400,000 hryvnias — other incentives are brought into play for potential “veterans” and “heroes.”

One might think: what could influence an ordinary young man or adult man from occupied Crimea more strongly to go to war against Ukraine than a one-time payment equivalent to four monthly salaries of a banking sector employee, an amount that in other sectors would take on average from eight months to a year to earn? Nevertheless, propagandists continue to look for new ways to reach the minds of potential recruits. Quite often, however, these efforts cause nothing but laughter through tears.

Perhaps the “motivational” short films produced by the TRK Krym television and radio company, controlled by the Russian occupiers and periodically circulated by various Russian Telegram channels, should be recognised as a separate genre of creativity. While watching these products of occupation agitprop, the first question that comes to mind is who they were created for at all and for what purpose, apart from siphoning money from the Russian budget, which is generously allocated to such examples of “culture and art.” Still, these clips are worth analysing one by one.

Relatively recently, one such video appeared in the Ukrainian segment of the internet. In it, several soldiers of the occupation army share their dreams about what they will do after the war — which, according to the authors’ design, will of course inevitably end with the Russian occupation of Ukraine.

The video, whose soundtrack is Leonid Utyosov’s Russian-language song “By the Black Sea,” dedicated to his native Odesa, begins with aerial footage of a seaside city. In the following shots, after a seagull’s flight and the sea surf, a girl with Asian facial features gently strokes a collection of works by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin titled “I remember a wonderful moment...” lying on her lap. Then Russian soldiers appear in the frame, having set up an improvised mini-camp supposedly on a beach, with radios and grenades, against the backdrop of cargo port cranes. One of them holds a newspaper with the front-page headline “For the first time as part of the Russian Federation, residents of Nova Kakhovka made their choice” and says that “there will soon be elections here too.” Another responds approvingly and says that after the war he will “stay here, in Odesa”:

“My relatives are from these lands. I’ll be returning home, one might say.”

When asked by the “newspaper man” whether he plans to buy land there, the “Odesan” replies that he will be given land anyway — “first of all, as a participant in the special military operation.” However, he does not intend to stay “at home”; according to him, he is in the war “until victory,” meaning... “all the way to Berlin, as grandfather ordered” (!). Meanwhile, against the backdrop of the names of Ukrainian cities — Kherson, Sumy, Chernihiv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kropyvnytskyi, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, Chernivtsi and others — the slogan appears: “We are fighting for our land!”

It is noteworthy that this and other videos are accompanied by subtitles: apparently, their authors have not abandoned hope that people with hearing impairments will also fight in Putin’s army for “their land” in Ukraine.

Another seemingly minor detail in this video also draws attention: the “Banderite” name of the city Kropyvnytskyi instead of the “canonical” Kirovograd. On the one hand, this is not entirely surprising: Russian propaganda still often refers to “liberated Artemovsk” by its historical name, now legendary — Bakhmut. However, the “directors” from Crimean TRK set out to correct this “flaw” in another video, where a Russian soldier with his face covered sits in a trench surrounded by ammunition boxes, whittling a stick with a knife and “playing cities” with a man in a T-shirt and camouflage trousers whose hands are tied with tape. The following dialogue takes place between them in Russian:

“— Novorossiysk. Your turn with ‘K.’
— Kyiv.
— Volgograd.
— Dnipro.
— There is no such city! It is Dnipropetrovsk! ... All right, let’s continue. Krasny Liman.”

Meanwhile, a title card appears with the same list of cities as in the previous video, again including the “non-existent” Kropyvnytskyi, but now with a different slogan:

“We are returning the names to our cities.”

The manic idea of “returning lands” is the leitmotif of another video in which two sappers, while clearing a field of mines, complain that the entire black soil is mined but reassure each other that “soon we will clear it and return all the land of Russia.”

Quite recently, a TRK Krym video filmed back in 2023 began circulating online with renewed force. It managed to surpass the previous “creations” in terms of madness and absurdity. The central figure in the clip is a traitor to Ukraine, ethnic Azerbaijani Akim Hasanov, a native of currently occupied Mariupol who performs under the pseudonym “Akim Apachev.”

He began his career in the Ukrainian media space as a cameraman and music video director. However, after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war, he became a “war correspondent of the L/DPR” for the “ANNA-News information agency” and began glorifying the Russian-controlled “militiamen.” During the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Hasanov-Apachev, on the occasion of the destruction of his native city by the occupiers, re-sang the Ukrainian folk song “Plyve kacha” together with Russian singer Daria Frey — the song to which, since the Revolution of Dignity, Ukraine has bid farewell to fallen defenders of Ukrainian freedom. The clip for the distorted version of the song, which supports the occupiers’ narratives, was filmed on the ruins of Azovstal and shown on the Russian propaganda TV channel RT. Soon after, YouTube blocked the video for hate speech. In February 2023, Apachev performed his version of “Plyve kacha” before Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and on New Year’s Eve 2024 — on Russia’s Channel One.

At the beginning of the “Crimean” video, Apachev sits on the ruins of a house holding a kobza with an “Erin go Bragh” (“Ireland forever”) sticker and other Irish symbols. He asks the Russian “brothers,” whose faces are covered, how they are doing and hears in response:

“We repelled the assault, burned a tank and took prisoners.”

To his next question to the “brothers,” asking why they are so gloomy, he receives a proposal to “play one of ours” and begins performing... the Ukrainian folk song “Oy chyi to kin stoyit.”

After the first verse, the clip is interrupted by two title cards: one with the slogan “We will return Ukrainian songs to Russia! Along with Odesa and Kyiv” and another calling for contract military service in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. The clip then shifts to a landscape of the White Rock, against which appear a girl — supposedly a Crimean Tatar, according to the authors — and Apachev with a white horse. Suddenly, he appears in field uniform riding on a tank. After alternating shots of a herd of horses rushing across the steppe and Russian soldiers charging into battle, the girl stands on a country road with a tear in her eye, seeing off a truck carrying soldiers of the occupation army. It was reported that the territory and personnel of a military unit in the village of Perevalne, Simferopol district, were involved in the filming.

Practically everything in this clip looks schizophrenic — not least the call to “return Ukrainian songs to Russia,” while that same Russia is diligently eradicating those songs both on its own territory and in the occupied territories. In particular, during the period of the full-scale invasion, cases have become more frequent in Crimea of people being persecuted, fined and even imprisoned for listening to or performing Ukrainian songs that are declared “nationalist,” “Nazi,” “fascist” and so on. Among the latest such incidents was the 15-day imprisonment and 50,000-rouble fine — almost 500 euros — imposed on Simferopol doctor Andrii Perelyhin, whose phone was found to contain the Ukrainian song “Oy u luzi chervona kalyna,” a song with a 110-year history that the Russian occupiers declared to be the “anthem of the Azov regiment.”

The madness of the occupation punitive system is also demonstrated by the fact that residents of Russia and the territories it occupies are “charged” with listening to or performing Ukrainian songs under the article on “discrediting the Russian army.”

Russian propagandist Akim Apachev sings Ukrainian songs

At present, Russian propaganda uses Akim Apachev as an artist who “revives Little Russian folklore as a pure and good part of Russian culture, untainted by nationalism and inseparably linked to a shared history.” The idea of the Crimean clip for the song “Oy chyi to kin stoyit” is allegedly to remind viewers of a “single cultural space in which the Ukrainian language is an integral part of the ‘Russian world.’”

Collaborator Oleh Kryuchkov — “general producer of TRK Krym” and “adviser to the head of the republic” — spoke at length about the making of the clip:

“We believe that culture must not be surrendered to the enemy. Ukrainian songs have been sung and will be sung in different regions of Russia and we will not give these essentially Russian songs to Ukrainian nationalists. We decided to make a somewhat provocative story and show that we are fighting not culture but Ukrainian nationalism. Of course, no one will perform songs tainted by nationalism. Today, people in that territory are being told that if the evil Russians come, they will ban the Ukrainian language and culture. No, Ukrainian culture, which for centuries was Russian, is not going to be banned by anyone. Can anyone imagine a song in Russian being played on a Ukrainian state channel? I think only in some humiliating context. But we did it carefully, tastefully and without any mockery. This shows where freedom of speech truly exists, where people can speak the state languages — Russian, Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian.”

However, Ivan Skorikov, head of the Ukraine department at Russia’s Institute of CIS Countries, disagreed with this view, arguing that the song was in the “Little Russian dialect of those once wayward Russian Cossacks who eventually moved towards reunification with the Orthodox Russian Tsardom.” In addition, Kryuchkov somehow decided that after watching the clip, Ukrainian soldiers would allegedly surrender en masse. Apachev himself openly expresses views on the Ukrainian language that are no less detached from common sense: he considers it a “southern Russian dialect of the Russian language” and... a Russian weapon against Ukrainians (!), while stating that it “should not be used where it is not needed.”

Of course, Crimean propagandists could not ignore one of the occupation regime’s favourite themes — the alleged “persecution of the canonical church” in Ukraine — and devoted another clip to it. In it, Russian soldiers together with a priest in a cassock and helmet watch a video on a phone in which a man in camouflage and a Ukrainian marine’s beret curses another man who visually resembles an Orthodox clergyman and demands that he speak Ukrainian.

At this point, one soldier of the occupation army asks the priest whether he has seen “what these demons are doing in the Kyiv Lavra.” Another soldier joins the conversation and says that “yesterday they burned down another church.” The priest sadly replies that he has seen it and adds: “That is why we are fighting here, driving the unclean forces from Russian land. There is no other way.” After that, the video shows the familiar title card with the names of Ukrainian cities, but this time with a new slogan: “The Russian Army. Driving out demons since 988!”

It is unclear why the year of the baptism of Rus, which began in Kyiv, was chosen as the “starting point” — when no Russia, let alone its army, yet existed. The “cinematic” fighters then leave the forest belt, after which the actor-priest blesses them, calling God’s grace upon them.

From time to time, Russian “recruiters” still remember that not only Orthodox Russians can and should help Putin achieve his “special military operation goals”: after all, both in the Russian Federation itself and in the territories it occupies, there are representatives of other peoples and faiths. Therefore, a separate video was aimed at Crimea’s largest Indigenous people — the Crimean Tatars — and even released in two language versions, Russian and Crimean Tatar.

This work, like some other similar ones, was also included in the broadcasts of Millet, a TV channel controlled by the Russian occupiers and intended, according to its concept, for a Crimean Tatar target audience.

In the Russian propaganda video, several fighters ride across the Crimean steppe on top of a tank. One of them, with the call sign “Major” on his helmet, asks another, a combat medic, whether he knows who Akim Dzhemiliev was. The medic replies affirmatively and comments: “He is our outstanding Crimean Tatar dancer. During the Great Patriotic War, he went through Stalingrad, the Kursk Bulge and all of Ukraine. He ended the war in Prague and right there on Victory Day danced the haytarma on the barrel of a T-34.” When asked whether he could do the same, the medic again answers yes and then performs the national dance on the barrel of the tank, which stops specifically for this purpose, to the approving applause of his “fellow servicemen.” Then two “Crimean Tatar” fighters appear in a dugout. One of them clenches his fist and tells the other:

“They won in the Great Patriotic War — and we will win now!”

The Haytarma dance on the barrel of a Russian tank

In principle, watching this video should prompt reflection on at least several questions:

1. what is supposed to motivate Crimean Tatars today to side with Russia in its war against Ukraine;

2. who exactly “they” were who won in the “Great Patriotic War”;

3. what happened after that “Great Patriotic War” to the Crimean Tatars who lived in Crimea, as well as to Crimean Tatar soldiers of the Soviet army, including Akim Dzhemiliev, whose image Russian propaganda now uses for its dirty purposes.

A native of the village of Kuchuk-Uzen in Yalta county, Dzhemiliev was unable to return to his native Crimea after demobilisation in 1946, as Crimean Tatars were forbidden to live there after the deportation. He was forced to go to Horlivka, where his wife was staying. The couple later moved to Uzbekistan, where Dzhemiliev’s relatives, deported in 1944, were living at the time. In 1980, the choreographer settled in Novorossiysk and took part in the Crimean Tatar national movement. Already in his eighties, he returned to his homeland, where he worked for several more years at the Crimean Tatar Music and Drama Theatre, of which he became a co-founder. After retirement, in 1994, he was awarded the title of Honoured Artist of Ukraine. At the end of 2001, Akim Dzhemiliev’s earthly journey came to an end. Less than a year before Russia’s occupation of Crimea, in May 2013, a memorial stone honouring the outstanding master of Crimean Tatar dance was installed in the village of Malorichenske, formerly Kuchuk-Uzen.

The aforementioned “Crimean Tatar” video was not the only one released under the slogan “Many nationalities — one Russia, it is time to defend the Motherland!”

From time to time, TRK Krym finds new actors with covered faces who supposedly represent different peoples and call on their “compatriots” to fight against Ukraine on the side of the Russian Federation. Thus, this “interethnic squad” includes a “Belarusian,” an “Azerbaijani,” a “Greek,” an “Uzbek,” an “Armenian,” a “Crimean Tatar” and others.

Naturally, it also includes a caricatured “Ukrainian” who “together with his brothers — Tatars, Dagestanis and Russian troops — defends his homeland, Russia, because it is common to us all.” These characters are supposedly united by “love for Russia, defence of its interests and faith in victory over a common enemy.” Once again, the question arises: what exactly did Ukraine do to the peoples listed above that their representatives decided to “defeat” us? Still, one manages to remember in time that this is nothing more than manipulation staged by Russian directors.

Another question that may arise after watching these and other similar videos is this: are “canonical Orthodox Russians” really so unwilling to “liberate the historically Russian territories of Ukraine from Nazis” that such clumsy “recruitment” has to be conducted among representatives of other peoples? Even a superficial analysis of the sphere of interethnic relations in Crimea raises astonishment at how and on what these relations are being held together at all.

Nevertheless, the occupation “authorities” have decided to hold them together with the same thing Putin’s regime is now trying to use to hold its own country together — militaristic propaganda. At the end of September, it became known that the “regional national-cultural autonomy of Greeks of the Republic of Crimea ‘Tavrida,’” created after the Russian occupation of Crimea, had decided to follow in the footsteps of TRK Krym and secured grant support from the local “committee on interethnic relations” for its project “Under One Flag. The Participation of the Peoples of Crimea in the Special Military Operation” (Russian: “Pod edinem flagom. Uchastie narodov Kryma v SVO”). Within this project, three videos are planned about participants in Russia’s war against Ukraine of different nationalities and their “unity on the path to the common goal — victory,” for the sake of “strengthening interethnic harmony and patriotic education of youth.” These videos are expected to be shown in Crimean educational institutions and national-cultural public associations.

At the same time, the Crimean “state committee on nationalities” appears to have decided to join the recruitment of “new soldiers” to the Russian army from among national communities. Another “working meeting” was held at the end of September with members of the “regional Azerbaijani national-cultural autonomy,” with the participation of “deputy mufti of the Muslims of Crimea” Raim Gafarov and representatives of the Crimean “ministry of internal policy, information and communications.” Among other things, “committee chairman” Ruslan Yakubov specifically emphasised the possibility for foreigners to obtain Russian citizenship under a simplified procedure upon entering contract military service.

One would like to wish the Crimean “figures” more inspiration and imagination, so that they may more often drain the Russian budget through such initiatives without any specific target audience — giving us something to laugh at properly. Laughter, as is well known, prolongs life. And we intend to live long.

Vitalii Solonchak, columnist at Voice of Crimea