As dawn broke in the Ukrainian city of Kherson last summer, those who turned on the radio at 7 a.m. may have heard the Russian presenter greet the day by surreally imitating an animated video, reports The Guardian.

“As Lenin said: “We are hardened in work.” I was also an orangutan in the zoo, but when I started working hard, I bought a car, built a villa in the Crimea, and even increased my IQ. Work hard all day and you’ll be like me.”

Later at 3:00 pm: “Let’s create the People’s Republic of Alaska” – a reference to the history of the American state, which was part of the Russian Empire before being sold to the Americans in 1867.

These passages, according to the Guardian, are taken from handwritten notes found in Kherson, the headquarters of the Ukrainian national television and radio company Suspilne. The studio was handed over to the Russian propaganda station Radio Tavria between March and November last year, when the city was under occupation.

The texts capture a strange cocktail of Soviet nostalgia, a veiled threat, imaginary humor and extreme Russian nationalism offered to the population of the occupied territories. At that time, all the television and radio stations of Kherson passed into the hands of the Russians. Mobile communications and Internet networks were redirected through Russia, and Ukrainian social networks and news sites were blocked.

“Exactly” every hour, according to Radio Tavria notes, messages will be broadcast ostensibly from women from the occupied Kherson region and addressed to their loved ones fighting as part of the Russian army in Nikolaev, a Ukrainian city in the northwest, which it ruthlessly destroyed. came under fire from Russian artillery last year, but remains under Ukrainian control.

Radio Tavria was not heard in Mykolife because the Ukrainians blocked the signal. In fact, the target audience were those who were in occupied Kherson. “Helmet greetings to Nikolaev [Μικολάιφ]: we will set you free,” the notes read.

Even the weather forecast had to contain a grim supposed joke about the “heat” of the bombings. “Today it is 34 degrees in Kherson, there is no rain, a special hello to the city of Nikolaev, where it will be hot.” Between February and October last year, more than 2,000 residential buildings were damaged in Mycolife, resulting in the death of 148 civilians.

At 9:00 pm, after “half an hour of classical music”, the host, according to The Guardian, was supposed to remind listeners of the upcoming curfew. At 22:00: “The city falls asleep, the mafia wakes up. It’s time to catch the saboteurs,” meaning the Ukrainian resistance.

Sofya Chelyak, a journalist for Suspilny’s culture department in Lviv and program director for the Lviv Book Forum, found the notepad on a table during a visit to the city in late December. Together with her comrades in the human rights organization PEN-Ukraine, she delivered aid in Kherson and met with artists and television figures.

Russian soldiers used the first floor of Suspilny’s office as housing. Upstairs, where Celiac found the notebook in a box on the table, there was sudden abandonment. An empty bottle of Armenian cognac has been thrown out, letters from Russian children to soldiers are still glued to the walls, and the Russian military motto “We will not leave our own” along with the letter “Z” is engraved on the door.

According to Celiac, “Even if the script wasn’t used, it’s clear that someone was cooking something… I imagine them sitting there, drinking their Armenian cognac, creating this script and thinking, ‘How are we going to do this?’ ‘ . It’s not smart, it’s cheap and banal.”

The notes, studded with the symbol of the eagle on the coat of arms of the Russian Federation, even contain the lyrics of the song: “Radio Tavria speaks. Radio Tavria is the best radio in Russia. Radio Tavria, radio for you. 107.6 Radio Tavria, we are working for you.”

Suspilny’s team in Kherson failed to recapture the studios after Ukrainian troops occupied the city. The retreating troops blew up the transmission tower, and the building is unsafe due to the amount of shelling from the Russians during the liberation. Instead, journalists digitally broadcast from the shelter and raise money to support their work.

Radio Tavria, which brought announcers from Crimea, illegally occupied by Russia, continues to operate, but now from the left bank of the Dnieper, where the Russians have retreated.

Celiac also visited the city library named after Oles Gonchar – before last year’s invasion, it was a vibrant cultural center. During the occupation, according to library staff, books on the history of Ukraine and the EU were withdrawn from sale. were taken off the shelves.

In November, according to the Guardian, retreating Russians, possibly before they could lower the Russian flag hanging next to the library, bombed the flagpole itself. This damaged the building and shattered most of its windows, leaving ragged curtains blowing in the wind and exposing the collection to winter weather. Occupying a prominent position above the Dnieper Delta, within range of Russian artillery on the opposite bank, the building is today a dangerous place.

Here, Celiac found further evidence of the scale and color of Russian propaganda in the occupied city, such as leaflets illustrated with photographs of blond mothers and children in Ukrainian national dress receiving child benefits. Benefits were available, however, only to those who made their children Russian citizens.

He also found a 22-page brochure on the history of Kherson, published by the occupiers in the summer in preparation for the illegal September “referendum” on the official recognition of the Kherson region as part of the Russian Federation.

The document, apparently circulated in late summer ahead of the unrecognized referendum, is spiced with Soviet-era language, a strong sense of Russian nationalism, and the now-familiar mindset that the Ukrainian government is a puppet of the West and the Nazis. As in Vladimir Putin’s 2021 essay on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians, he sees Ukraine (or, as he says, Little Russia) as historically indivisible from the Russian Federation.

The pamphlet begins with 1,000 delegates at a meeting at Kherson State University voting to develop the pamphlet as “an ideological statement defining the future of these southern Russian lands.”

Then he proclaims “the unity of the Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and other peoples as a single fatherland, the successor of the Soviet fatherland and historical Russia.”

The brochure describes the period of Russian and Soviet rule in Kherson as a “golden age”. However, it does not mention the Holodomor, a period of forced starvation as a result of Stalin’s policy of collectivization, which led to the starvation of about 3.7 million Ukrainians in 1932-33.

“The golden age of Kherson ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union,” he says. After the Orange Revolution in 2004, the Ukrainian governments became “puppets of foreign capital.” The full-scale invasion in February 2022 was “a preemptive strike to defend Donbass, demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.”

The Russian language, which it says is being systematically eradicated in the region, will become the state language, according to the document cited by The Guardian. Its economic future is linked to alternative energy and the creation of a “complex of quality tourist resorts.”

The pamphlet concludes by stating that the region is “an integral part of a very large country bearing the proud name of ‘Russia’.”

“All this … very Soviet. It reminds me of the plebiscites in eastern Poland, western Belarus and western Ukraine in 1939,” said Timothy Snyder, Yale University history professor and one of the world’s leading experts on Ukrainian history, who reviewed the pamphlet. The point, he says, “is that no one really needs to believe it, we just have to see the very absurdity of the arguments as indicating that there really is no choice. The historical argument is that since Kherson was part of the empire, it must be part of modern Russia. It would also mean that most of Poland, all the Baltic countries and Finland also belong to Russia, as well as most of Ukraine.”

The arguments, he concluded, “are improvised. This is not the work of someone who knows what he is doing. And that in itself is interesting. The propaganda was bad. They no longer know where they are going.”

Source: Guardian