KYIV – Less than a week after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy muted three nationwide television channels for broadcasting Russian disinformation, Moscow reiterated its stance that Ukraine is part of “the Russian world.”
Following a national security meeting that was chaired by Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 9, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said the agenda focused on the “Russian world” and that Ukraine was considered a part of it.
He was responding to a question posed by a Ukrainian UNIAN news agency Moscow correspondent.
Mr. Peskov noted the topic remains a priority for the government and that the Kremlin will use “soft power” to promote this concept in Ukraine.
“Of course, there are a lot of Russians and Russian-speakers in Ukraine – they all belong to the ‘Russian world,’ and it would be really foolish to deny cultural, historical ties, and common roots,” Mr. Peskov said. “We know that such a line – to deny these common things – is being pursued by Ukraine, but we don’t like this.”
To many Western and Ukrainian Kremlin watchers, Russia’s use of the term “Russian world” is a component of Moscow’s tool box for holding sway over its neighbors by promoting Russian language and culture to augment and justify the use of “hard power” by covertly employing military, informational and cyber warfare whenever needed to assert its influence.
In 2013, Russia introduced a new foreign policy concept with an emphasis on regional priorities, including Ukraine, whose territory it illegally annexed and invaded the following year. It fit into the country’s National Security Strategy to 2020 and its military’s doctrine.
Mr. Peskov’s statement was a reminder to Kyiv’s leadership that Moscow doesn’t consider Ukraine a legitimate nation-state on equal footing with Russia.
As recently as January 28, a chief Russian propagandist called on Moscow to annex Ukraine’s Donbas, consisting of the two easternmost regions where a war has raged with combined Russian military, irregular and Kremlin-backed forces since April 2014.
Margarita Simonyan, the global editor-in-chief of the Russian state-run RT television network (formerly Russia Today), attended the “Russian Donbas Forum” in occupied Donbas where she said, “Mother Russia, take Donbas home.”
She entered the occupied Ukrainian territory illegally and the English-language media outlet she heads is registered as a foreign agent in the United States and banned in Ukraine.
Ms. “Simonyan’s call for the annexation of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region was not an isolated outburst,” wrote Alvydas Medalinskas, a former Lithuanian lawmaker and political analyst for the Washington-based Atlantic Council. “Since December 2020, Russian informational war efforts have increasingly focused on the so-called Russian Donbas doctrine. This initiative aims to provide historical justification for Moscow’s claims to eastern Ukraine by emphasizing the region’s longstanding ties to Russia.”
Beyond the war zone, Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) said on February 5 that it busted a network of agents consisting of former military intelligence officers run by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) in five oblasts: Kyiv, Odesa, Mykolayiv, Zhytomyr and Chernihiv.
The undisclosed number of agents were allegedly working on behalf of FSB officers Vadim Dautov and Denis Sobko, whose titles and ranks were not provided.
In particular, the “Russian agents were preparing sabotage operations,” the SBU said. “Among the targets were combat aircraft of the armed forces at Kulbakino airfield [in Mykolayiv Oblast].”
Twitter, Inc.
The Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry’s “official” Twitter account for Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
The suspects also carried out orders to monitor and report on the movement of Ukrainian military personnel, including high-ranking officers, and hardware, the counterintelligence agency said.
During the searches, an arsenal of weapons and ammunition was seized: four AK-74s, two pistols, two rocket-propelled grenades, 44 grenades, more than 4,000 rounds of ammunition of various calibers, about 3 kilograms of TNT and electric detonators, the SBU said.
The kidnapping and illegal transfer of a “former commander of the special operations forces” to Russia was also planned. The “Russian secret service offered a reward of $100,000,” the SBU statement said.
In addition to constant cyber-attacks, Kyiv’s diplomatic and military corps have grown wary of the increasing militarization of the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia forcibly seized in early 2014 and where it has stationed nuclear-capable warheads, according to the Ukrainian military.
Last February, then-Foreign Affairs Minister Vadym Prystaiko reiterated the “ongoing militarization” of Crimea by Russia at a United Nations General Assembly session, while adding that seven U.N. resolutions have so far condemned Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine.
“The occupied areas have become a territory of fear and terror,” Mr. Prystaiko said. “Since 2014, the Russian Federation’s illegal annexation has left 14,000 people dead and over 27,000 wounded, while 2 million residents of Crimea and Donbas have fled their homes and 3.4 million remaining are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.”
Russia’s official Crimean
Twitter account
Ukraine’s diplomatic corps this week protested Twitter designating the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry’s official Twitter account in Crimea. Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Emine Dzheppar called on the social media giant to remove its “blue check” verified account.
“This account is verified because it’s notable in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category,” Twitter said of the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry account.
Officials from Twitter’s communication department did not respond to a request for comment from The Ukrainian Weekly.
Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. Volodymyr Yelchenko said he sent a letter of protest to Twitter on February 8.
The account of “Russian occupation authorities in Crimea cannot be described as official and legitimate,” the Ukrainian diplomatic mission said on Facebook.
Crimea water shortages
On February 8, the head of Russian-controlled Voda Kryma (Water of Crimea) state-run enterprise in the Crimean capital of Simferopol announced severe fresh water shortages.
Enterprise head Vladimir Bazhenov said that water levels at three Crimean reservoirs continued to decline in February, ranging between 7 percent and 26 percent of their design capacity, according to Krym Realiyi, a subunit of the Ukrainian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
As of February 1, he said the peninsula’s reservoirs had a total of 36 million cubic meters of water, which was 48.875 million cubic meters less than a year ago. Three reservoirs are approaching “dead volumes,” the enterprise said.
Mainland Ukraine cut off water supply to Crimea through its North Crimean Canal, which had previously supplied about 80 percent of the region’s potable water, following Russia’s invasion in 2014.
Occupying authorities have since not found a sustainable solution to adequately supply the region with water. Efforts have included expensive desalination efforts, inducing rainfall through “cloud seeding” and the use of more groundwater wells, Euromaidan Press reported.
Water rationing began in September with water being supplied for only six hours per day. The same month the U.N. monitoring mission in Ukraine said that, according to international law, Russia bears full responsibility for providing Crimea with water.
The European Security and Defense journal reported in March that Russia has 31,500 soldiers stationed on the peninsula, consisting of three main components: land, air and naval. Russia has the “means of delivering nuclear weapons” by air and sea from Crimea and that significant modernized hardware are positioned there, including the new ground-based air defense S-400 TRIUMF systems.
Ukraine’s military has repeatedly warned of the “increasing militarization” of Crimea and the potential of invasion of mainland Ukraine from the peninsula.