The Lawfare Podcast: The Russian Occupation of Kherson, Ukraine

[Introduction]

Tom Southern: It comes down to two main things, which is two things that Putin likes to weaponize, right? It's history and memory, and the two are obviously related, but they're not quite the same thing. He's trying to build a legacy for himself. He's trying to rebuild the Russian Empire. I mean, we’ve been saying this for some time, and people would look at us as though we were mad.

And I think we couldn't have been proven more right now with the invasion of places like Kherson. And it's not just Kherson and Zaporizhia, he's obviously trying to get all of Odesa and the rest of it, you know, anywhere where he can claim that there is a high Russian population, he's going to reclaim it as sort of an ethno-nationalist without ever claiming to be so. And it's, it's quite an interesting move for him not least because he spends so much of his time, or his country's money at least, trying to convince the world that they are some kind of anti-imperialist power. They're the last and biggest imperialist power in the 21st century at the moment. So, his entire strategy is about his legacy and the future history, if you like, of Russia.

Tyler McBrien: I'm Tyler McBrien, Managing Editor of Lawfare, and this is the Lawfare Podcast, October 11, 2022. Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the illegal annexation of the Ukrainian region of Kherson, along with others. In the months leading up to the sham referendum that solidified the annexation, the Kremlin launched a forced assimilation campaign that targeted nearly every aspect of daily life in Kherson.

I sat down with Belén Carrasco Rodríguez and Tom Southern of the Center for Information Resilience to talk through their research into the means used to establish and strengthen Russian occupational rule over the seized territories. We discuss this Russian playbook for control and the ways that forced assimilation may be working, or not. It's the Lawfare Podcast, October 11: The Russian Occupation of Kherson, Ukraine.

[Main Podcast]

I first want to start with the Eyes on Russia project, which is the series. Why did you launch the Eyes on Russia project, and can you tell us just a bit about it?

Tom Southern: So we launched Eyes on Russia because we've got quite a long standing history of blending what we would call open source intelligence with counter disinformation programming, and we have observed Russia for a very, very long time.

In the build up to the invasion, it was our hunch, it was our belief, that they were going to invade despite what they were saying. And one of the things that we wanted to do was to document it and get the proof to, to prove the lie really of what the Kremlin was saying. So initially this project actually was started looking inside Russia and inside Belarus at troop movements, because the idea was that we could identify relatively easily, to be honest, through social media, through CCTV, a number of other things, troop movements, you know, the trucks, the tanks, whatever it might be, to prove that the buildup itself wasn't some form of exercise, right? It wasn't any kind of maneuver.

They certainly didn't need the kind of equipment that they were taking, nor the numbers of people that they were taking if they were just going to sort of wave the saber a little bit. And, and try and, you know, get Ukraine to concede on something and then pull back. We knew it was going to be invasion. So that's, that's why we started doing it. Ultimately, when the invasion happened, we turned much more to documenting the impact on people, on civilian infrastructure, on land, you know, war crimes, humanitarian effect, everything else. And again, it's, it's fundamentally down to accountability. I think the Kremlin has a longstanding history of believing that it can operate with impunity, both in terms of warfare and in terms of the disinformation side. And I mean, often that's been the case, right? I mean, they've taken chunks out of Georgia, they've taken chunks out of Ukraine, nobody really did anything.

And I think they thought, again, that would be the case this time. They sort of massively misunderstood and underestimated actually what the response was going to be, partially from the West, but also, frankly, from civil society actors like CIR, but also ordinary people across the world. And, I must say, the Eyes of Russia project works so well because actually what we've done is we've hoovered up a lot of volunteers who were already doing OSINT off their own back, as well as a number of other well-known entities like Bellingcat. We've pooled all of our resources into the same place so that nobody is really doubling up, and everybody can take away what they need to from it, but also all of us can hold Russia to account in a much more efficient way than I think was the case before. And it's kind of borne a lot of fruit in that regard.

It's, it's frustrated them quite a lot because the sheer amount of data that we've been able to verify and collate and put out there into sort of package reports, out into the media, out to politicians, out to sanctions bodies, or, you know, war crimes cases, has been such, and to such sort of high quality, that there's not really much they can do to counter it, and they've sort of doubled down. Instead of, you know, trying to push as many lies as they used to, they're mostly seen now to be focusing on their domestic audience and some of the audiences around the world who might still believe them. And I guess there's still quite a lot of work to do, but ultimately it's about accountability.

Tyler McBrien: Great. And before we dig into the meat of the report, which there's a lot, a lot to get into, I'm curious to go back to one of your earlier points that you said you had a hunch that this was the real deal that Russia would invade. I'm curious what sort of data points informed that or, or, or just prior experience. Belén, I can start with you.

Belén Carrasco Rodríguez: Well, I mean you're gonna start with me, but I joined the project actually in May. I started as one of the volunteers. I was associate director in another open source intelligence company and I think that one of the, the key things that Eyes on Russia project has had is just it gathered all the, like, experts on the field together first as volunteers and then like, like me, other people have a state working on the project, but I was working outside and I decided to join.

I was like seeing how CIR was covering well that the medical supplies that they were taking, with videos with the medical supplies that they were taking. I mean, they were not representative of military trainings. I mean, they suggested that something else was going on. The amount of military build up along the border and a lot of open source intelligence data and a lot of data points that actually suggested that it was going to be some sort of invasion without actually just like receiving any sort of secret intelligence. And I think that this is one of the key things that CIR's activity has highlighted with the Ukraine War.

The Ukraine War has been the first event, or the first war that we've been able to follow almost live because of the amount of footage that we are receiving and organizations like CIR are able to collect, analyze, and verify and cross check with footage that we have documented from previous days, from previous events. And then just like try to, to understand what's going on in the ground. And like I think the first weeks of the of the invasion our work was critical because we were able to provide information to a journalist and policymakers of exactly what was going on, but also to inoculate audiences against like Kremlin denial of things that they were saying that they were allegedly not happening, but we actually had the evidence, the footage that it was going on, right?

So these three pillars were just like very, were essential, I think, at the beginning. It was just like the, the informing policymakers, providing reliable information also to journalists, but at the same time, like informing the public because they were receiving information about the war anyway. So just like providing them with the right type of information on the footage that we were receiving, that was key in the beginning of the invasion.

Tyler McBrien: Now, fast forward a few months after the invasion, your organization has decided to focus on the occupation of Kherson for this particular report. What's the significance of this region for you, which you've called a test case. So, the question is test case for what and why this particular region for your focus?

Belén Carrasco Rodríguez: Kherson was the first major Ukrainian city to face Russian occupation. And it was, so the first, like, three cities got invaded the same, 24th of February, the day when the invasion started. And then on the 2nd of March, Kherson city was, like, between the 1st and the 2nd of March, Kherson city was taken. And also it's one of the most populated, occupied areas right now in Ukraine.

Tom Southern: Yeah, one of the reasons that we chose Kherson, and it could well have been Zaporizhzhia for the same reason, but we wanted to focus really specifically on one of the occupied regions, because we started getting quite concerned that one of the Kremlin's sort of, you know, main strategies is not just attrition in warfare, it's attrition in the info sphere. And we know that there's a lot of noise out there, there's a lot of information, a lot of disinformation about Ukraine and life in Ukraine at the moment that's going around. And even some of the people that are feeling best disposed towards Ukraine are fatigued in the form of, you know, seeing too much out there about this, that they're tired of war and they're tired of reading about it.

And we really wanted to have a sustained series that brought to home exactly what life is like under Russian occupation in these areas covering, you know, absolutely everything that you could want to know from the cost of a bottle of shampoo to who the death squads are. So there's, there's a lot to unpack in there and we felt like it wouldn't be sensible to try and spread that over, you know, Zaporizhia and Kherson and the Donbas. It'd be much better to focus on one region.

And going forward, we're, we're sort of considering how we might continue that because to maintain that focus in the public's eye is very, very difficult at the moment. There is a lot going on. There's other stuff happening in people's lives. You know, in the UK alone, there's something of a financial crisis going on. There's a cost of living crisis. People are sort of running out of space to think about Ukraine. And yet, we need to keep that in people's minds because it's exactly one of the Kremlin's strategies is to make people forget about it or to turn away from it so that they can do what they want.

So fundamentally it is about making sure that people are still aware of what is happening and what the reality of life is in Kherson. It's, it's not any good there. It's not any better just because Russia's taken over and it's been consolidated and the war is open quotes over there. It's not. And there is resistance and there is oppression and there is hardship. And I think the more that we can sort of bring that home to people, as I mentioned, the better it will go for Ukrainians in the longer term.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah. And speaking of, of painting a picture for our listeners, I'm not sure if either of you can speak to what Kherson looks like as a city, you know, what it's like to experience it as someone who lives there currently.

Belén Carrasco Rodríguez: Life is very complicated for people living in the Kherson region. Like, since the indirect coercion that they are experiencing from the occupation administration, and like Russian forces saying that they have organized for months, door to door visits, inviting people to get a Russian passport, which is just like, it's a very intrusive mean of coercion that, like Russian soldiers knocking on your doors asking you to take the Russian citizenship.

Also if you, for example, like, like things in the daily life, right? Like if you are a business owner or you want to register a business, you cannot register it if you don't have now a Russian passport. You cannot use a Ukrainian SIM card. You cannot drive a car if it doesn't have a Russian plate number. And for these things, you need to get in order your Russian papers. So, actually there, like, since like, I would say since mid-April, increasingly the occupation administration, which is, it's coordinated and, like, receives order by the Kremlin. They have been implementing policies that make life very difficult for those that cannot leave the region and don't want to cooperate.

At the same time they have obstructed evacuation routes and it's very difficult also and very expensive to leave the region. So it is, it is like very hard life which overlaps with the fact that there are some areas like let's say essential, essential services like electricity, heating, things like this. The Russian, Russian forces have taken over the key infrastructure, but electricity has, is being supplied allegedly still from Kyiv. So there is kind of like this duplication of power that make very difficult for Kherson residents to see, just like, okay, who is providing my electricity? Am I going to have heating this winter, like, are the Russians providing for it? Should I pay in rubles or should I pay in Ukrainian hryvnia? So it's, it's very difficult. It's very complex. It's very difficult not to cooperate with occupation authorities, but at the same time, it's very difficult to understand what's going to happen at the basic level in the near future.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, and I think that that duplication you mentioned is captured really well in the report's title of “Parallel Worlds” and another line that that really struck me from the report is soldiers invade, but it's bureaucrats who occupy. So Tom, maybe you can help me out with, with this one. You know, I'm curious why the Kremlin needs to essentially ‘Russi-fy’ if I'm using that term correctly, the Kherson region. You know, why is it not enough to simply invade with soldiers and, and hold the position militarily?

Tom Southern: That's an extremely good question, and it comes down to two main things, which is two things that Putin likes to weaponize, right? It's history and memory, and the two are obviously related, but they're not quite the same thing. He's trying to build a legacy for himself. He's trying to rebuild the Russian empire. I mean, we've been saying this for some time, and people would look at us as though we were mad, and I think we couldn't have been proven more right now with the invasion of places like Kherson.

And it's not just Kherson and Zaporizhia. He's obviously trying to get all of Odesa and the rest of it. You know, anywhere where he can claim that there is a high Russian population, he's going to reclaim it as sort of an ethno-nationalist without ever claiming to be so. And it's, it's quite an interesting move for him, not least because he spends so much of his time, or his country's money, at least, trying to convince the world that there are some kind of anti-imperialist power. They're the biggest imperialist power in the 21st century at the moment. So, his entire strategy is about his legacy and the future history, if you like, of Russia.

And he feels very strongly that Russia was aggrieved, that Ukraine has never been its own thing. In fact, I mean, theoretically under his, his ideology and the ideology of a number of Russian nationalists, there are three types of Russians, right? You've got Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians, and they are all one people. They've just got slightly different names for them in Russian. So this is, from his perspective supposedly, correcting a historic wrong. So, holding the territory as simply an occupier isn't what he wants to do, sort of, in the long term. And that's, again, that's why fundamentally we're looking at, sort of, a banality of evil question, right? We're not looking at the soldiers necessarily taking over everything in the long term. It's the bureaucracy of the thing. It's, it's making it so hard for people that they have no choice but to be Russified, for want of a better word.

And it's also within that hardship creating sort of bubbles of opportunity, for want of a different word. So, you can't get the education you wanted anymore in the West, it's blocked to you, so they're giving you these opportunities, as they would call them, to go get educated in Crimea. You have to operate in rubles now. Well, you have no choice because you need to eat. Maybe your kids will only know rubles, and their kids will only know rubles. So then everybody is Russified in the long term. It's, he's very much playing the long game in this.

And I don't think he particularly cares that he's been ostracized. He certainly doesn't care that so many Russians have died doing it, and he cares even less about the number of Ukrainians, despite what he claims in terms of open quotes, liberating them. So this is all part of a very, very long game for Putin. Whether or not, as the rumors claim, it's because he's now terminally ill I have my doubts about that. I think this has been his plan for a long time. We can go back to Ossetia, we can go back, you know, to Crimea, none of this is particularly new. But it is a much more advanced version of his, frankly, ethno-nationalism than we've ever seen before.

Tyler McBrien: Now, Belén, to go back briefly to some of these methods of occupation that we mentioned. Tom, you just mentioned education, and I think this is a, a particularly interesting case an aspect of the report. Can you talk a bit about what this new academic year was like in Kherson? How it was different or a break from the past?

Belén Carrasco Rodríguez: Children have been a target of Russian occupation techniques for, like since the beginning of the invasion. And this is because to consolidate power in the long term, they can easily like, modify the memories of future generations about the work.

So, they have been well, not the Kremlin, but the Kremlin through the occupation administration. They have been creating new policies oriented, and like they have particular efforts on creating new policies oriented and targeted at children, especially with the new school year beginning on the 1st of September, that are like aimed at creating and generating attitudes favorable to the Russian occupiers. And also implementing the Russian educational system in, and replicating the Russian educational system in Kherson.

One of the key things that I think that are most relevant is that they have been replacing textbooks for first graders, history textbooks and replacing the Ukrainian ones for the Russian ones. And these textbooks include sentences like Russia is our motherland, we need to take care of it. So policies oriented at education are just trying to brainwash children and  generate, like, make them forget that they were once Ukrainians. So now the, the curriculum is taught in the Russian language, and Ukrainian language, if so, can be chosen as, as another module, but, like, the, the full program is, is taught in Russian. And, like, they have been, they are being taught about Russian history as if Kherson had been always Russian. This is aimed at, like, make them forget that once they were Ukrainian, they, once Kherson was part of Ukraine, maybe, like, there is some rhetoric anti-Ukrainian, so they just, like, generate also negative attitudes towards Ukraine.

But the main aim is to generate and to make them feel they are Russian and they, they should speak Russian, they have like historically always been Russian and the better place for them to study, to grow, is Russia. And with this, also, we can connect some summer school programs that they've been implementing for children to being to, to go like from Kherson region and from other occupied areas like from Zaporizhzhia or to, from the Donbas to, they have been taken to Russia to summer camps there where they share experiences with other Russian children.

And of course this is like a full influence operation, right? That they, they are taken from war zones to safe places where they have fun for a few weeks. So they connect directly the idea of being safe with being in Russia. So there is a full circus around these, these like educational policies trying to influence children, not only in Kherson, but in all occupied territories.

Tyler McBrien: And Belén, one more quick follow up for you. You've been reporting across a number of these methods, and I think that really speaks to just how far reaching and all-encompassing these campaigns have been. Did you find, or did you report on any methods that involved direct physical violence toward the occupants of Kherson?

Belén Carrasco Rodríguez: Yeah, so we've come across during our investigation with plenty of cases of the occupation administration implemented direct violence against the residents living in occupied areas. Now, like in the in the second part of the series and in third part of the series, we are looking into these more deeply, but there are lots of cases of abductions, illegal detentions When I was investigating this kind of indirect means of coercion, I came across, at least, claims of at least four torture chambers that had been established in or a bit outside Kherson City that were detention centers previously. And now they have been just like transformed into torture chambers where partisans, like oppositors to the new administration, the occupation administration, are being allegedly held and tortured.

We are monitoring the disappearance of key Ukrainian leaders that were occupying, well, like, positions in the Kherson administration before the invasion. So they have disappeared. So yeah, there is just like the, there is just like a full account of direct violence being applied to a Kherson resident. And I would say that like, not necessarily because the bureaucrats have began implementing the occupation mechanisms, the occupiers, the military forces stopped applying direct violence. Direct violence definitely has kept going, is still going, despite other means to establish power in the long term in the region.

Tyler McBrien: Now, most of what we've discussed so far has taken place in the physical realm, but I'm curious, maybe, Tom, you can speak to, what this forced assimilation campaign looks like in the digital realm. So what is some of the online propaganda techniques that are targeted specifically at Kherson residents?

Tom Southern: I think probably one of the most interesting ones actually is not necessarily a disinformation campaign, rather part of the bureaucratization of the whole thing, because everybody really at the moment is on Telegram, right? Particularly in Kherson, it's probably the most secure method of getting communications in and out.

But one of the things they've done quite successfully is to create a number of administration Telegram accounts, if you like, where they do provide sort of quite general important updates on like where you can collect your pension now, or how to get a stamp, or you know the, the food prices or something like that. Obviously, however smattered within that is a great deal of disinformation and propaganda around sort of what the Ukrainians are up to and what the supposed Nazis are up to. And I think the, the interesting thing, the reason that that's actually surprising is that Russia is quite blunt usually with its propaganda or it has been around Ukraine anyway, and they've realized that they need to be a little more careful with what they do and maybe actually provide people with some services. They're not doing a good job at all of it I mean, they're doing an atrocious job. But they realize that you can't just propagandize people into submission. You probably need to give them some food and water and bread and circuses and the rest of it. I mean as I say, they've not done it properly particularly well.

I think the, the other side of it is, you know, the outward facing propaganda that they send out primarily to Russians. They're showing how good a job they're supposedly doing in Kherson. They're obviously not. It reminds me an awful lot. I used to work on ISIS propaganda and counter propaganda and they, they did very similar things, you know, glossy magazines, lovely videos showing the children eating sweets when obviously, actually, they were not having a good time at all. So there's a lot of sort of interesting parallels with other authoritarian or terrorist entities that have done similar things.

I think the, the one thing that we've seen drop off, I would say, is actually a lot of references to some of the, the narratives that they pushed previously that didn't really work. So there was a lot of initially, both inside Kherson, inside Ukraine and outside Ukraine, of claims of Banderists, which I don't think anybody outside of Ukraine had heard of. Stepan Bandera, the Nazi collaborator in Ukraine who has been dead for a very long time and certainly has no current followers. That seems to have dropped off to the tune of much more, as I say, sort of practical affairs supposedly showing that the Kremlin, or rather the occupational authorities in the breakaway states, are providing the, the services that people need. And that the Ukrainians are supposedly shelling them and, and killing them and, and are the, the oppressors in this.

Tyler McBrien: I think one question that is likely on our listeners minds is, is any of this working? And how can we tell? Belén, I'll first go to you. Once again, is this campaign working on residents of Kherson? And how can we know? I think one, one, one way that listeners might be interested in is, you know, whether this had any bearing on the sham referendum at all, or if that's just something we shouldn't even look at, you know, given the obvious problems around it. So, Belén, to you, you know, is any of this working?

Belén Carrasco Rodríguez: Well, yes and no. Fear is a very strong influence tool. So by coercing them and to, by imposing measures that restrict their, their freedom and their freedom to, to be Ukrainian. And just like by detaining, arresting people that are opposed to the occupation administration and not allowing to register their businesses to those that refuse to get a Russian passport, they are implementing a policy of fear. And that, of course, for the people that have no opportunity to leave, that has just, like, made some sort of effect.

But I have to say, like, with all the data that we've coll- we've been collecting, Ukrainians are still very defiant and very resilient despite the, the, the Russian, Russian powerful occupation or just, like, the Russian propaganda being spread to, like, to spread fear, but also to, to say, to tell them just like, okay, no, no worries. I mean, if you, if you go along with what we say, then you are safe. They have been like very resilient and very defiant. I would say that to some extent, those that have no choice, we've seen that, well, I mean, they end up getting a Russian passport or they apply for a pension at the Russian front because they have no other choice, but it is very difficult to, to separate like if they are doing that because Russia's propaganda is working, or if they are doing that because of fear. So I would say that the most successful influence technique that they have right now, the Russians have on their side, is fear, which doesn't last forever.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, I suppose it depends on what you mean by working. But Tom, I want to go to you. You mentioned that you, you might have just as easily looked at Zaporizhzhia, for example. To what extent is this playbook, this very same playbook being applied to other regions? And to what extent has the Kremlin sort of adapted its approach based on each region?

Tom Southern: It is very much the playbook that they use. I mean, they, they are relatively accepting that they do need to adapt it to the region. I mean, they obviously had a slightly a easier time in the Donbas perhaps than they have in either Kherson or Zaporizhzhia. I think fundamentally what it comes down to to them is the resources that they have curated over the years.

So to give a bad metaphor, it's all about whether or not you can push the open door or the door is closed on you, right? So in in parts of the Donbas, they had an excellent network of potential collaborators that they had been curating for years. And so they had, you know, not only potential politicians to run the place, but also, you know, milit- militias that could help them out. And indeed they could claim that those militias were doing it off their own back and Russia was merely supporting them.

Much more difficult in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. So both regions, they have for a very long time been curating people primarily in political parties. So the opposition bloc and the opposition platform ‘For Life’ in Kherson, actually there was also the, the Saldo bloc. There's always these small sort of blocs on the councils. And the Socialist Party of Ukraine. They basically found people over time, gave them jobs, money, sort of tacit support, moral support, whatever it might be. And sort of waited until the invasion before they could activate them, right? And some of them were activated somewhere.

And I think the, the interesting thing is how competent those people are. That's always going to be the problem for the Kremlin, because I think even they understood going into Kherson, that they weren't going to be able to find the same, even small amounts of popular support that they had in some pockets of the Donbas. Those people in the Donbas quickly changing their minds, I think, after Russia took over. But nevertheless, it makes it much more difficult if you don't have a baseline of people who are just going to go along with you, if everybody's resisting you. Then where do you start? So, it comes down fundamentally to who they have in place.

Now, the problem that they have, and that I don't think they anticipated, in both Zaporizhzhia, in Kherson, and indeed if they do ever attempt to take anywhere else where they planted these sort of potential collaborators, is that the kinds of people that are willing to go along with this tend to be quite obscure or strange or fundamentally incompetent and that is the problem they've really faced.

So here's some good example. They very quickly had to start busing in administrators from Kaliningrad. You know, proper men in grey suits who knew how to run, you know, an oblast, because the people that they put in charge there were complete morons. Now they're still there in sort of title only, but they have no power at all anymore, because fundamentally if you left it to them, the whole system would collapse. And that's true, you know, in Zaporizhzhia as well. It will be true anytime they try it anywhere else.

And the only reason it's ever worked before in, say, South Ossetia is because the opponent to them in South Ossetia was Georgia, a much smaller country, couldn't take back militarily. Ukraine can take back militarily. In fact, they're showing, you know, very quickly how they can do it. And so, you know, there hasn't been time for them to embed their new sort of administrators, as I say, the competent bad guys, if you like, in a way that they've managed to do elsewhere. And I think that is where fundamentally their playbook falls down.

Tyler McBrien: I'm reminded of the truism that you know, in attempting to explain certain phenomena between malevolence and, and incompetence, it's, it's usually the latter. So I guess that's, that's something working for the Ukrainians. Now, you know, as is often the case in open-source investigations, I think the, the methods and the techniques behind the investigation can be, you know, as interesting as, as the story itself. So, Belén, I'm curious if you could walk me through some of the, the more creative or, or interesting methods you've used to, to gather the data.

Belén Carrasco Rodríguez: Well, this has been a very complex investigation to gather data because of the sources, right? So, the first thing we have to do is to establish an index of reliability of the sources that we were using. The sources that we use are mainly, because they are open-sources, they are mainly claims from, or the occupation administration, or from Russian officials cross checked compared with the claims by the Ukrainians residing in the area and living in the area, or the Ukrainian authorities that either fled the country or remained there while they were not, they hadn't been, they hadn't disappeared. But of course, it's like sometimes we come across the challenge that one of our key sources disappears.

Also, some of the, of the testimonies that we've been using is people that have managed to fly out of the region. So in order to, to collect sources and to verify the type of information that we were including in this investigation, we need, we needed to approach each source and establish, you know, like, is this source reliable based on, not based on whether if it's Russian or Ukrainian, but also, even if it's Russian, and it has provided in the past reliable information that has been verified with open source techniques. This, this investigation has relied heavily on Telegram, Telegram conversations. Because there is where all the occupation administration has set up their open quotation marks official closed quotation marks accounts. So, I'm coming back again to the duplication of power in the region, right?

So, we have, like, the, the official administration of Kherson region still has a website which is not controlled by the Russia-controlled Kherson administration. And the Kherson administration has opened several Telegram channels. So this means that like most of our research has been just like scrolling on these, these Telegram channels, like, seeing what the Russians are saying, seeing what the Ukrainians are saying. And trying to verify the footage and the videos that they are sharing with open-source techniques like, like satellite imagery, just like providing, like seeing like if they are claiming that this detention center is now under two chambers, see where it is placed, like claims from like neighboring residents, like if they are saying that they hear screams at night, things like that.

So it's been like, like not more about being original in what comes to open source intelligence gathering. I think that for that we've followed more, like, the witness methodology that we have for our projects, like Eyes on Russia included. It's, it has been more about managing and like diving deep into the sources, getting to know the sources, getting to understand where they are coming from, then monitoring them to see whether they keep providing reliable information or not. And our analysts have been brilliant at that.

Tyler McBrien: What's next for the Eyes on Russia series? What other, what other investigations do you have in the works?

Tom Southern: So we continue to produce a lot of reports on the, on the war itself, as you might expect. I suppose, from this kind of reporting that we've done on Kherson, there's a number of things that we are looking at that spin out of it that I think are of particular interest for anybody that's been doing sort of counter disinfo, but also counter Kremlin, even counter far-right, actually, ops for a long time.

One of them that's particularly interesting, actually, is around the weaponization of orthodoxy. So, in Kherson, there is a quite prominent priest, who seems to be particularly happy to bless the occupiers and bless the administration. A lot of this comes out of really strong historic work by the Kremlin, and Patriarch Kirill in particular, in trying to curate this, sort of, brotherhood of orthodoxy, much like they tried to do a brotherhood of Slavs previously, to try and convince, you know, not just Russians that this is a just, in fact, a holy war, but try and convince the, you know, the Greek Orthodox, the Cypriot Orthodox, Bulgarian Orthodox, Macedonian Orthodox, and so on and so on.

And it's a really interesting operation that they have been undertaking for decades. And this is a good entry point in it because it's so contained, if you like. It really brings it to home that there is a collaborationist bishop who is, you know, essentially the, the holy voice of this war in Kherson. And I think the more that we look into this the more I'm hopeful actually that there will be an understanding that this kind of thing needs to be looked at globally and much wider.

We also know similarly from the weaponization of children that they've undertaken that Belén has mentioned in the Kherson series. This is very much part of their playbook as well and I feel like it's something that has exposed a flaw actually in their overall strategy because they, once again, they claim to be the defenders of the family and the defenders of children globally, and yet we can see that they're actually murdering them at great numbers. So I think it's quite likely there's going to be a number of spin offs of this report specifically. I'm very keen to start it off as one around the infiltration of orthodoxy.

Belén Carrasco Rodríguez: Well, I'm going to say a few key points, points that I think that are key conclusions from our investigation, which is still ongoing.

The first one is that both the referenda and the annexation are part of like a power consolidation strategy that started from day one. So, they've been progressively, occupation administration coordinated and controlled by the Kremlin has been implementing progressively policies to coerce civilians to cooperate and to make the legitimate authorities of the region to, or either to fly out or outside of the region or to disappear, right? So, but this is not like, the referendum and annexation are just like the next stage of our consolidation strategy that started from the one of the invasion.

Another thing that I think that is quite relevant is that the, right now the Ukrainians that are part of the occupation authority, they are managed, and they are being told what to do by, by the Kremlin. So I don't think in our research, we haven't come across any Ukrainian institution, any legitimate Ukrainian institution in Kherson region that collaborated with Russia. One of the examples is on the 26th of April the, like, three key figures of the new occupational administration were appointed, right? It was Volodymyr Saldo as head of administration, Kirill Stremousov as deputy head, and Alexander Kobets as mayor of Kherson. They, the three of them, they were appointed by Viktor Bedrik, which is a Russian military commandant of the Kherson region. So he was a Russian that appointed the Ukrainians. No Ukrainians cooperating with Russia.

When, so, the head of administration, Volodymyr Saldo got allegedly poisoned, got health issues. Like, I mean, like, like sources are contradictory with this, but there are some claims that he got poisoned. So, at the beginning of August, he disappeared. There were some claims that he was dead. And somebody like Sergei Yeliseyev, took over Saldo's position, right, as head of the Kherson region. Like, officials of the administration were still being appointed, but there was not Ukrainian head in charge. So this means that all the officials were being appointed indirectly, like directly from, like indirectly from Russia, because you know like, like the Ukrainian that was in charge of appointing the, the new officials of the occupation administration had disappeared, was allegedly dead. And without a Ukrainian figure and Ukrainian authority, like officials of the administration were still being appointed.

A third point and last point that I would like to make is just the great, the great activity of partisan movement and opposition activity, especially the Yellow Ribbon movement, which has been counter campaigning before the referendum, like with leaflets and in social media. And they have been very active and very brave and very resilient, and even, like, if some members of the movement have disappeared, they are well organized and they are keeping, keep resisting. And not just like, like opposing to collaborate, they are actively campaigning. Our investigation has collected a lot of data that is going to be published in one of the reports, upcoming reports of the series, that tells the story of the Yellow Ribbon movement. This just like brave citizens that are just like, they have, they are not even part, they haven't been trained military. They are just like campaigning to tell people not to vote in the referenda and not to cooperate with the Russians. And I think that this is just like this, this is deserves a mention.

Tyler McBrien: I think that last point in particular is a perfect hopeful note to end on. So with that, I'd like to thank you both very much.

Tom Southern: Thank you.

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