Russia blasts city with propaganda
Kremlin says ‘humanitarian corridor’ open
Russian forces have driven trucks with huge TV screens through Mariupol’s streets to pump out Kremlin propaganda to residents.
After a two-month media blackout, citizens in the Black Sea port queuing for food and water had to endure Moscow’s desperate attempt to justify the city’s destruction.
The move was part of a wider propaganda blitz by Russia in the Ukraine regions it has captured.
Mariupol, in the south, was virtually obliterated by a lengthy Russian siege that destroyed 90 per cent of residential buildings and hobbled electricity and water supplies.
Russia said on Thursday the port of Mariupol, had reopened. Sea mines had been cleared and what it called a “maritime humanitarian corridor” was now open in the Azov sea.
Meanwhile, the head of the separatist Donetsk People’s Republic said Ukrainian fighters might still be hiding in the sprawling Azovstal steelworks — the last holdout in Mariupol — even though Moscow had officially declared it “completely liberated”.
Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, said he planned to sue Russia over losses caused by the bombardment of his steel plants in Mariupol. He will demand US$20 billion in compensation.
In a desperate attempt to press home its message in the city, Moscow dispatched trucks to broadcast Russian state TV to the 100,000 people still living in the area.
Russia’s ministry of emergency situations said: “Mariupol residents have been in an information vacuum for the past three months due to the electricity blackout.
“The Russian ministry has arranged for three mobile units to inform and alert the population.”
One truck was stationed in the centre of the city while the others cruised its streets. Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor, said the city’s Russian overlords had forced schools to cancel summer holidays so they could prepare children for a switch to Moscow’s education system.
Similar moves were announced in the occupied Crimea, Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions, as the Kremlin stepped up efforts to indoctrinate Ukrainians in the captured territory.
“The main goal is de-Ukrainisation. Children will be taught Russian language and literature, Russian history and mathematics all summer long,” Andryushchenko said.
In Crimea, the peninsula annexed from Ukraine in 2014, the pro-Kremlin puppet government said it would end English lessons in schools.
Vladimir Konstantinov, speaker of the State Council of Crimea, said: “Why should we blindly follow the path of the English language? Why teach something that is not needed if a person never goes to London?”
Since its invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has been critical of Britain because of Boris Johnson’s high-profile support for Kyiv.
In the Kherson region, the Russian military told schools they had to follow Moscow curriculum from September 1.
Teachers have been warned they will be taken to Crimea for “retraining” if they don’t comply.
Moscow pressed the West yesterday to lift sanctions against Russia over the war, seeking to shift the blame for a growing food crisis that has been worsened by Kyiv’s inability to ship millions of tonnes of grain and other agricultural products while under attack.
Britain responded that Russia was “trying to hold the world to ransom”, insisting there would be no sanctions relief, and a top US diplomat blasted the invasion’s “sheer barbarity, sadistic cruelty and lawlessness”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin told Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi Moscow “is ready to make a significant contribution to overcoming the food crisis through the export of grain and fertiliser on the condition that politically motivated restrictions imposed by the West are lifted,” according to a Kremlin readout of the call.
Ukraine is one of the world’s largest exporters of wheat, corn and sunflower oil, but the war and a Russian blockade of its ports have halted much of that flow.Many of those ports are now also heavily mined.
Russia also is a significant grain exporter, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said the West “must cancel the unlawful decisions that hamper chartering ships and exporting grain”.
His comments appeared to be an effort to lump the blockade of Ukrainian exports with what Russia says are its difficulties in moving its own goods.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken noted last week that food, fertiliser and seeds were exempt from sanctions imposed by the US and many others.
With the war grinding into its fourth month, world leaders have ramped up calls for solutions. World Trade Organisation director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said about 25 million tonnes of Ukrainian grain was in storage and another 25 million could be harvested next month.
European countries have tried moving grain out of the country by rail — but trains can carry only a small fraction of what Ukraine produces.