The occupying forces, daily shelling the right bank of the Kherson region, at the same time try to shift responsibility for their actions onto the Armed Forces of Ukraine and local authorities. The “Kyiv junta” allegedly cannot protect Kherson residents, so they are waiting for a renewed occupation without leaving the region. At the same time, enemy propaganda spreads narratives that everyone has “forgotten” Kherson and that news from the city are ignored by national TV channels.
A corresponding series of fakes appeared on the pro-Russian Telegram channel “Kherson Resistance”.
“Residents of Inzhenerne, Molodizhne, Tekstylnykiv, Zelenivka are already tired of appealing to all instances and writing on social networks that every 5–10 minutes something flies over and explodes above these settlements. People ask for protection not in officials’ reports, but in deeds,” the Kremlin propagandists note.
It is telling that the occupiers try in their publications to depersonalize those who shell the settlements on the right bank of the Kherson region. According to the logic of the authors of the channel “Kherson Resistance”, mines and shells fly at civilian Kherson residents by themselves, without the involvement of the Russian army. This is a psychological manipulation aimed at absolving the aggressor of responsibility for these strikes.
At the same time, the ability of the Ukrainian authorities and the Armed Forces to protect Kherson residents is called into question. Specific names are already being named here: in the Russians’ opinion, the head of the regional military administration Oleksandr Prokudin and MP Serhii Kozyr are to blame for the shelling of Kherson. They allegedly do not do enough to protect the civilian population.
In reality, however, the Russian army strikes the right bank of the region with such a number of drones that, unfortunately, a certain percentage of them do reach their targets, despite electronic warfare measures and mobile fire groups. Thus, according to the Kherson Regional Military Administration, just last week more than two thousand UAVs were launched at the Kherson community alone, 93% of which were destroyed while still on approach.
Another common Russian manipulation is that Kherson region is being “silenced”:
“On nationwide channels and social networks Kherson region has stopped being mentioned in the list of oblasts during air raid announcements – we are effectively being crossed out of the information field. For them we are simply expendable material that they are trying to send to the slaughter,” the Russians say.
This fake is quite easy to refute: simply type the query “Kherson” into a search engine, for example the YouTube platform – and you will see that local, nationwide and international media are not silent about the situation in the regional center – information about the shelling of Kherson is one of the top news items on most popular outlets.