Illustration photo – A woman with a Ukrainian flag stands in front of Russian soldiers on the street in Kherson, Ukraine, during a demonstration against the Russian occupation on March 19, 2022.
Moscow – Russian pro-war bloggers and commentators complain that there is arbitrariness and chaos in the occupied territories of Ukraine, formally annexed to Russia, reminiscent of the “wild 1990s” in Russia itself. The Russian editors of the BBC drew attention to it.
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War reporter Roman Sapoňkov, who has around 70,000 followers on social networks, complained that traffic police in the occupied part of the Kherson region in southern Ukraine on March 6 confiscated several cars from volunteers that were used to deliver “humanitarian aid”, including products intended for Russian soldiers on the front line. According to him, the police claimed that the cars were being searched as stolen, and threatened the volunteers to sign consent to the cars being searched.
“They simply seized the cars without any documents. In other words, from the point of view of the law, these cars were never in the hands of the police. If they (the cars) have already evaporated somewhere, they will never be found,” he complained.
“All this is not just arbitrariness, but it is sabotage and work for the enemy,” says journalist from the state television company VGTRK Andrej Medvedev. “Because the interruption of supplies from volunteers to the front means that our guys in the trenches will be left without the necessary drones, first aid kits and sights during the offensive of the Ukrainian forces. Here it is difficult to understand whether this is the tyranny of individual police officers or the work of a cell of enemy agents,” wrote Medvedev .
The Russian police rejected the accusation as unfounded. “During the check, doubts arose regarding the authenticity of the documents of three minibuses stopped while trying to cross the border between the two regions,” the Ministry of Interior administration for the Kherson region commented on the incident. According to her, the results of the background check confirmed that the documents were forged. Subsequently, the spokeswoman of the Ministry of the Interior, Irina Volková, announced that the incident was being investigated.
Another commentator on the war, Vladimir Romanov, meanwhile, complained that the situation in the “new territories”, as Russia refers to the occupied territories in the south and east of Ukraine, which tried to annex it, from a legal point of view it resembles a “gray zone”, a no-man's land.
“Basically, the 90s are whizzing by at maximum speed there. From banal money-squeezing to large-scale seizure of foreign property. Freshly baked dignitaries of all kinds come here to 'catch fish in murky waters'. It is better not to say anything about the fate of the money that is sent here from the state budget,” he wrote.
