For almost a month now there has been an operation by the US and Israel against Iran, which the world’s leading media report on daily. And while residents of government-controlled territories of Ukraine have access to a wide range of sources to form their own understanding and picture of the situation, the choice of sources for residents of territories temporarily occupied by Russia is narrowed due to blockages, which creates a wide field for manipulation. Which, obviously, Russian propagandists take advantage of. We looked at how pro-Russian propagandist media and Telegram channels in the temporarily occupied territories of Kherson region cover the US and Israeli operation against Iran.
Silence at the “official level” and a geopolitical breakthrough from Kakhovka
First of all, we checked whether representatives of the occupation authorities had made statements regarding the operation in Iran, and found that almost all “official” spokespeople of the occupation authorities did not notice the war in Iran. The occupying governor of Kherson region, Volodymyr Saldo, who usually comments on any nonsense and tries to speak about all more-or-less important geopolitical events as if something depended on his opinion, for some reason did not notice the events in the Middle East.
Saldo last mentioned Iran in December 2025, when he reported on the Tavria Forum held in Moscow, where a delegation from Tehran was present.
Almost all Telegram channels of the occupation administrations and their leaders were also silent about the events. All — except one. Only the head of the Kakhovka city occupation administration, Pavlo Filipchuk, shared his important thoughts with readers. Moreover, he even reposted them on the occupation administration’s channel.
He published the first post on March 2, quoting dictator Putin and offering his assessments. Overall, they can be summed up as: “Trump’s blitzkrieg failed,” as if the US had launched a ground operation, which, of course, did not happen.
A week later, on March 9, Filipchuk was already saying that Zelensky is nervous, and on March 16 he analyzed Trump’s behavior. But it seems this was only the beginning.
On March 20 Pavlo Filipchuk boasted that a Russian site had written an analytical piece about the new Iranian ballistic missile “Khorramshahr”, relying on the opinions of two experts — one of whom works in the occupation administration of Kakhovka.
For some reason Pavlo Filipchuk also calls the second expert — the editor of the magazine “Arsenal Otechestva”, Oleksii Leonkov — a Kakhovka resident, although it is known that he was born and lives in the Moscow suburb of Mytishchi. What is most interesting is that the use of missiles by Iran was also commented on in this article by the head of the internal policy department of the occupation administration, Yurii Malyshenko, who calls himself a “political scientist” and a “military expert”.
The only place where a resident of Krasnodar Krai, who was recently sent to work in occupied Kakhovka, could have become an expert on Eastern affairs might be Antalya. If one believes leaked Russian databases, in 2019 he spent 10 days vacationing in Turkey.
We could not find any other evidence of expertise of the resident of the provincial Labinsk in Krasnodar Krai (RF). It seems that the participation of Kherson region collaborators is limited to this strong integration of a minor occupation official from Kakhovka into the global geopolitical space.
Telegram channels — extreme caution
Of course, most of the content about the conflict in the Middle East is produced by pro-Russian occupation Telegram channels. From February 28 to March 22, 2026, the Telegram channel “Новости Херсонщины”, run by a former Kherson resident and now Anapa resident Viktor Marchenko, devoted 107 posts to the war in Iran. Occupied Oleshky, which the Russians have turned into a real dead zone, for example, mentioned it only 67 times during the same period.
Moreover, as in most of the monitored channels, the authors wrote almost nothing about Iran during the first three days of the operation, apparently waiting for an official Russian position.
In the context of the Middle Eastern war they repeatedly mention the “Anglo-Saxons”, although they write that Britain refused to help Trump, whom the propaganda channel’s authors occasionally call the “red-haired racketeer”.
The Telegram channel “Kakhovsky Gorodskoy Byt”, which also denounces the Anglo-Saxons, even conducted a poll of its audience about the war.
But then they presented the results of a completely different channel’s poll with a manipulation about the “image of the Anglo-Saxons”. Most likely, the authors resorted to such manipulation because their poll was taken by only a little over 300 readers and they did not want to show such ridiculous figures.
The Telegram channel “Na samom dele v Khersone”, as well as the entire network of similar channels with names of various Ukrainian cities, used the events in Iran to popularize the network. The authors themselves do not write news about the war in Iran; instead, they repost messages from “brother” channels.
The “Kherson” channel advertises the “Dnipro” and “Odesa” channels, and they, in turn, advertise the “Kherson” channel.
The channel “From Mariupol to the Carpathians”, which specializes in publishing videos of Russian attacks on civilian residents of Kherson, actively began writing about Iran on the first day of the US attack, but already the next day the authors forgot about the conflict and over three weeks Iran appeared in the channel’s posts only twice, both times as reposts from Russian channels.
It is believed that the channel is run by a former law enforcement officer from occupied Donetsk, Oleksandr Sheptura, but its information policy is adjusted by someone else, which is very evident in the case of Iran.
Most of the channels we analyzed also cover the war in Iran cautiously, limiting themselves to reposts of the Kremlin’s official position or its top propagandists.
Pro-Russian media of Kherson region retransmit the official position
As with the Telegram channels, the numerous propagandist online media of occupied Kherson also do not produce their own content on the war in the Middle East. Here there is either complete silence or intensified broadcasting of the Kremlin’s official position.
Thus, the propagandist online media “Kherson News Agency” very rarely mentions the war in Iran, and mentions are usually reprints of texts from other Russian sources and statements by “experts” such as Dmitry Medvedev and the Luhansk “political scientist” Volodymyr Karasiov.
Meanwhile, the publication kherson.life, which for many years mimicked a “Kherson media”, and since February 2024 has become the basis of Russian propaganda in the region, devotes hundreds of news items to the war in Iran.
As a rule, these are reprints of news and texts from other Russian sources. Here we see the same “Russian experts”, Medvedev’s opinions and the same usual set of statements.
The media “Bez Formata. Kherson”, which appeared not long ago, did not notice the war in Iran and focused on reprints of news from Kherson region and news about the number of lavash breads that were baked in a year in the so-called DPR.
There were also very few materials about Iran in the top propaganda publication “Bloknot Kherson”. Unlike others, this outlet has a certain number of real authors who invent news about Kherson and Kherson region. But Iran is not mentioned often. Usually, it is mentions in evening digests, where they invariably assert that because Trump is occupied with Iran, Ukraine is about to lose the war. There are no original author articles on the subject here either.
The editorial office of the occupation TV and radio company “Tavria” follows the situation in Iran most closely.
On the site, news about the war in Iran, based on official Russian sources, are published almost every hour. But there is not a single mention of Iran in the channel’s television content.
Afterword
The reaction of pro-Russian media and the occupation authorities of Kherson region to the war in Iran demonstrates their complete dependence on Russian information policy. At the “official level” silence predominates, which indicates the absence of an independent position and the expectation of signals from Moscow. The content of Telegram channels and media mostly consists of reprints and retransmission of Kremlin narratives without attempts at independent analysis. Isolated attempts at “expertise” look artificial and are often based on dubious or outright absurd sources. Under such conditions the information environment in the TOT becomes vulnerable to manipulation and does not give the audience the opportunity to form an objective understanding of international events.
Serhiy Nikitenko, regional representative Institute of Mass Information in Kherson region