Russian political scientist Sergei Markov, who was one of President Vladimir Putin’s closest advisers in the past, says the Moscow army took the “soul” of Kherson by stealing a raccoon from the city’s zoo, and compares it to the famous Guardians of the Galaxy movies.

Kherson. The political struggle over the raccoon continues (…) It was taken from Kherson by Russian soldiers during the evacuation. During this time, hundreds of news stories have already been published about this raccoon in Russia and Ukraine,” Markov wrote in his Telegram channel.

We will remind you that last week the Russian military stole a raccoon and several animals from the zoo in Kherson before retreating to the eastern bank of the Dnieper.

Images of a struggling raccoon as one of the Russian occupiers tried to pull it out of its cage for “evacuation” have made the rounds on social media, sparking a wave of irony from netizens.

“The raccoon has already become a symbol of the soul of Kherson. And it turns out that the soul of Kherson left Kherson together with the Russian army,” Putin’s ex-advisor now claims in Telegram.

In addition, he notes that “a lot of people remember it in the movie Guardians of the Galaxywho controlled the Raccoon [Rocket] to control the universe.”

“Looks like the Russian military is going to control our little Ukrainian universe? Here is a groan in Banderostan,” he concludes by mentioning Ukraine after Stepan Bandera, a controversial Ukrainian nationalist.

Russian paratroopers claim that the Kherson raccoon ended up in the trenches with them

Although it is unclear where it was filmed or if it is indeed the same raccoon, the Russian military claims that the animal came to live with them in the trenches.

“This chick lives with us paratroopers. We feed him fresh fish, nuts, sweets, and grapes every day. Lives with us in the trenches. We are guarding it,” one of the Moscow military said in the video.

However, some netizens doubt it is the same raccoon, noting that it appears much smaller than the one in the video that went viral on social media last week.

“The question is, did they lose the original raccoon and were told to find another one?” asked one Twitter user.

Another possibility, however, is that the animal in the recording, which is now being distributed by the Russian military, is another raccoon also from the Kherson Zoo, which was not in the room in the original footage.

Who stole a raccoon from Kherson

Ukrainians also managed to identify the man who took the raccoon or raccoons out of the cage, this is Oleg Zubkov, the director of the Yalta Zoo and the private Taigan Zoo in Crimea.

Zhubkov, a former deputy of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea in the 2000s before Moscow’s illegal annexation of the peninsula in 2014, was an open supporter of the Russian occupation at the time, but later found his business suffered after joining Moscow due to corruption, bureaucracy and other reasons.

After all, he constantly complained about corruption in the peninsula under the leadership of Russian authorities, which resulted in him being involved in more than 100 lawsuits. Zhubkov even went so far as to say that he did not feel like a person in Russia, and stated in a 2018 interview that life was better in Ukraine and that he regretted supporting Russian annexation.

In August this year, he was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison over an incident at his lion park where one of the animals bit a Russian guest.

“I was surprised to see him on the video because I thought he was in prison, but Zhubkov was released at the end of October by a court order,” said Volodymyr Tretyak, a Ukrainian researcher at the Technical University of Vienna who specializes in mass media. and that.

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