The Russian army has never showed up anywhere near the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, but this didn't stop Russian officials from creating a database of its buildings to proclaim them the property of Russia. Let's take a look at Russia's "paper annexation" of Zaporizhzhia. 👇
Russia's Federal Service for State Registration, Cadastre and Cartography, "Rosreestr," has included Zaporizhzhia in its real estate database. This means that the entire city, with all its streets and buildings, is listed there as belonging to Russia. Take this example: 2/
On this yesterday's video, kids walking in one of the central parks in Zaporizhzhia watch with horror as a Russian missile flies just over their heads and, moments later, hits one of the main hotels in town. Russia essentially claims that the hotel is within its borders. 3/
Its address, Mayakovs'koho Ave, 19, is in the database. 4/
Curiously, streets are mentioned there just as they are called in the real – Ukrainian – city (or were called as of 2022). This means that the "virtual" Zaporizhzhia, "possessed" by Russia on paper, has Independent Ukraine St. 5/
Russia also officially claims to have Heroes of the 93rd Brigade St. 6/
No matter how ridiculous it sounds, Russia will not abandon its claims on Zaporizhzhia unless it's stopped. In the meantime, Russia's claims on the city result in the never-ending horror as Russian attacks take the lives of its residents on the daily basis. end/
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One surprising thing about this metaphor is its longevity. In 1861, in a confidential letter to War Minister Dmitry Miliutin, which I was lucky to find in Moscow, one senior official compared Ukrainian speakers with "an ulcer on the body of the Russian Land." What was the cure?👇
His plan was to mix them with Russian speakers and to weaken the Ukrainian gentry as much as possible. The Ukrainian elites were seen as the source of all evil. Because of them, he wrote, the "spirit of hatred towards the Muscovites" reigned among ordinary people. 2/
The gentry, he warned, "followed the precepts of Hetman Ivan Mazepa," nurturing separatist aspirations. Worst of all, the gentry made commoners "maintain the spirit of a separate nationality" – the nationality, that is, separate from the Russian one. 3/
In Zaporizhzhia, a large urban center in Ukraine the size of Oslo, hundreds of thousands of people are living their daily lives without knowing that Russian school maps portray their hometown as an ordinary city in Russia, not unlike Kursk or Tula. Here's what these maps show: 1/
The Russian army has never been anywhere close to Zaporizhzhia. And yet, the Russian teaching portal YaKlass, widely used in school curricula, has updated its maps to include both Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. 2/
Russian schoolchildren are being taught that their immense motherland has acquired a sizeable Ukrainian population (even though this emphasis on difference subverts the premise of the invasion). 3/
The Russian army strikes a dam to hinder the Ukrainian counter-offensive in the Kherson region? This happened not only to the Kakhovka dam. And yes, Russia wrote about it in glowing tones.
While speaking about the Kakhovka disaster, don't forget there was an earlier precedent. 1/
On September 14, 2022, as AFU were advancing towards Kherson and established a bridgehead across the Inhulets River, several Russian cruise missiles targeted the dam of the Karachun Reservoir near Kryvyi Rih. 2/
The aim was to unleash flooding in the Inhulets to cut off the Ukrainian troops and prevent the AFU from crossing the river. Another part of the plan was to partially flood Kryvyi Rig, Volodymyr Zelensky's hometown – a symbolic message Russia didn't miss the chance to deliver. 3/
Lots of people, myself included, have been censored by Twitter for writing about Ukraine. I've spent quite some time in imperial archives exploring how writings about Ukraine were censored in Tsarist Russia, so here're my short historical censorship guide for those concerned:
1. Search for the word "Ukraine" in the first place. Normally, tsarist censorship changed it to "Little Russia," "South Region," or "South-West Region" (for Kyiv, Volhynia, and Podolia provinces). Besides, any publication can be considered "tendentious" if it is...
"imbued with love for the Cossacks and Ukraine." This was the fault of the poem "The Cossacks and the Sea" by Danylo Mordovtsev (RGIA, f. 776, op. 21, ch. 1, d. 164, l. 128).
While @UN invites us to celebrate Russian Language Day (the birthday of Alexander Pushkin) at the time when a major catastrophe is unfolding in Ukraine, it's a good time to remember that Pushkin's birthday was often used as an occasion to celebrate empire. 1/
On this day, in 1899, Russian imperial society in tsarist Tiflis, today's Tbilisi, organized festivities to commemorate the centenary of his birth. Pushkin was a powerful symbol that made Russian incomers feel at home in the Caucasus. 2/
In his writings, he acquired the Caucasus for the empire long before the imperial troops managed to accomplish the decades-long conquest of the region. His romanticized portrayal of war lured impressionable children of Russian noblemen to join the ranks of the Caucasus corps. 3/
Olga Skabeeva, Russia's propagandist-in-chief, calls for the extermination of all human beings in the Kharkiv region as a way to finally solve the Ukrainian question. It's a major departure from the more traditional genocidal rhetoric that accompanied Russia's invasion. 🧵 1/
Normally, this rhetoric implied the extermination of those unable or unwilling to be "re-educated" into Russians. According to the Russian revanchist tradition, Ukraine and the Ukrainian identity is an "anti-Russian" political project invented by the West to destroy Russia. 2/
The pompous official exhibition "Ukraine. At the turn of the epochs," which was first held in Moscow in November 2022 and which has been travelling across Russia since then, was designed to explain the reason for the invasion to the general Russian public. 3/