The lenin statues have reappeared in the south of Ukraine and the ruble it is once again legal currency since the beginning of the month. The newlyweds receive official Russian documents, and the Ukrainian flags are progressively being replaced by the hammer and sickle of the soviet red flag. It is the new landscape that is beginning to emerge in the occupied areas of southern and eastern Ukrainejust over two months after the start of the invasion ordered by Vladimir Putin. The incipient measures to Russify the conquered territories and imposing a new administration there denote that the Russian army intends to stay. Quite a dystopia for many Ukrainians, who feel as if the clock of time has broken down and the old Soviet Union take back control of their lives.
Anastasia escaped from Kherson a few hours after the start of the Russian invasion, but a good part of his family stayed in the city, the first of the large Ukrainian cities occupied by the military of the kremlin. “My mother tells me that it is like going back to the early 1990s, when Ukraine became independent: long lines, shortage of basic products, hyperinflation… It’s crazy because no one wants to go back to the past& rdquor ;, assures this 26-year-old interpreter in a telephone interview. Her mother’s routine is now entirely devoted to survival. She spends her mornings queuing in front of markets and banks that are still open. In the early afternoon she returns home, before the street becomes Comanche territory.
“Russians are everywhere and behave as if the city is theirs. There is no freedom. They are kidnapping veterans of the donbas war and those who demonstrate against the occupation. They are taken away for questioning and some disappear&rdquor ;, he adds with a broken voice. As is happening in other parts of occupied Ukraine, the Russian occupiers have replaced the elected officials of Kherson with Kremlin collaborators. The new mayor is a former officer of the KGBand the regional governor, Volodymyr Saldo, a former Ukrainian deputy from the Party of Regionsthe same one to which it belonged Viktor Yanukovychthe country’s last pro-Russian president.
The ruble becomes legal currency
On May 1, these same authorities introduced the ruble What legal tender in the region and announced that it will coexist with the hryvnia Ukrainian for several months until I can replace him. They have also ordered teachers to adopt the russian resume when classes resume after the summer. A little further east, Melitopolalready in the Zaporiya region, where the ruble is also beginning to circulate, there are plans for the headquarters of the oschadbank Ukrainian is occupied by the sbernak Russian, a state bank sanctioned in the West for its ties to the Kremlin. In other recently captured areas of the Donbas they have been introduced moscow postage stamps and the new ones marriages are certified with russian official documents. The kind of measures that are taken when a occupying power wants to manage the territory.
“It is out of the question that the Kherson region can return to Nazi Ukraine & rdquor ;, Kirill Stremsousov, number two of the new ‘civic-military administration’ of that southern province, said last week, alluding to one of the distortions of Russian propaganda. “kyiv will never again be able to impose its despicable nazi policies on our land & rdquor ;. If the Kremlin’s intentions go through, as everything seems to indicate, to occupy the region indefinitely, the only thing left to do is to know the model it will follow. “One option is to bet on creating in Kherson and Zaporiya ‘people’s republics’ similar to those established earlier in Moldovan Transnistria, Georgia and Donbas&rdquor ;, says Andreas Umland, an analyst at the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies.
‘People’s republics’ or annexation
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Hence the rumors about possible referendumsthe same instrument that the Kremlin used in crimea and the breakaway regions of Lugansk Y Donetsk. “The other possibility, increasingly likely, is that I opted directly for the annexation and the occupied regions become part of a new administrative district of the Russian Federation & rdquor ;. Putin already invoked it a few years ago, when he referred to the areas now partially under his control as new russia (Novorossiya), the name given to the region during the more than 100 years it belonged to the tsarist empire. At that time, it encompassed from Donbas to Odessa and also included Crimea and Moldavian Bessarabia.
All these regions are now once again in the Kremlin’s sights and it is not ruled out that Putin will announce the annexation of several territories this Monday, coinciding with the lavish anniversary of the Soviet victory against Nazi Germany in World War II, as acknowledged this week by an adviser to the Ukrainian president. At the moment, it is the red flags and the statues of Lenin, like the one that reigns again in the central square of Kherson, that have returned to Ukraine. Vestiges of a common past to which Ukraine does not want to return, as he demonstrated by erasing the soviet heroes of its streets and monuments behind the euromaidan riot in 2014.