The reference to the Moscow suburb of Khimki is the farthest eastern advance of German troops during the Battle of Moscow in 1941.
By Aleksandr Kots
[KP] In the evening, the signalers somehow set up television. Ukrainian. Tridents rippled on the dim little screen. They were everywhere - on the T-shirts of the hosts, on the embroidered shirts of the guests, on the screens of the panels, on the nightstands of the speakers ... The atmosphere of a great victory reigned in the studio (victory in Ukrainian. - Ed.). It was embarrassing to watch this action while being in a grouping of Russian troops 20 kilometers from Kyiv. For the participants of the TV show is embarrassing.
The unfortunate Ukrainian TV viewers were frankly lied to: about 105 downed Russian planes, about 15,000 killed "occupiers", about hundreds of burnt tanks of the "aggressor", about counter-offensives and encirclement... Those who listened to this should get the feeling that the Armed Forces of Ukraine, at least, are already near Moscow Khimki. And even parked "Abrams" (American tank. - Ed.) On Red Square. Why, then, a curfew is introduced in Kyiv for a day, and in Kharkov the air raid siren does not stop, the experts do not explain to viewers. Distilled hatred poured from the screen directly into the brain. It’s a mystery why, a month after the start of the special operation, we still don’t cut off this stream ...
There is no Ukrainian television in the territories occupied by Russian troops. This does not mean that the population was immediately reforged and took to the streets to meet the liberators with pies.
First, the oven is nothing. The humanitarian situation here is catastrophic - there is no one to fill the vacuum of power, people are left to their own devices.
Secondly, the majority does not care what kind of power comes - as long as there is no war, light, heat, water and favorite lemonade in the store would return. And this requires power.
Thirdly, the ideological opponents of Russia have not disappeared even with the disappearance of television. In one village, a bloody military backpack with equipment was found in a hut. In another house at the military commissar, they found as many as 100 kilograms of TNT - not far from the strategic bridge. There is no "Soviet power" here either. And something needs to be done about it.
Former deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, Oleg Tsarev said on Thursday that a decision had been made in Moscow to create military-civilian administrations in the territories liberated from the Kiev regime. And this is now, perhaps, the most important decision - someone should be engaged in the restoration of infrastructure, the supply of food and essentials, the search for relatives - my Telegram channel is inundated with hundreds of requests to check the basement at one address or another.
"In fact, the attitude towards us still very much depends on what kind of church is in the village," an officer of one of the special services told me, who, out of personal enthusiasm, created a semblance of a military-civilian administration in one of the villages. - If the Moscow Patriarchate, then there are no complaints, everything is fine. If Kievsky, then they look away, put their hands behind their backs, chatter inappropriately ...
The area is not easy here - here the lands were given to veterans of the ATO (war in Donbass. - Ed.). All of them are now in the detachments of the Ukrainian territorial defense on the other side of the front line - the Irpin River. And families are here. But signals are already coming from them that if nothing happens to them in case of surrender and they can safely return to their families, then they are ready to lay down their arms there. We need to let them know that this is possible. As they did in Chechnya in their time. But for now, they are also in the information blockade and listen to Ukrainian radio.
The Russian military, by the way, is also in "info-isolation", news from Kyiv does not reach them. The fact that they were “surrounded in Bucha, Irpin and Gostomel” and they were “cut off from supplies”, as the adviser to the head of the office of the President of Ukraine Arestovich, the soldiers learned from us.
We drove to the forward positions near Gostomel as usual, without experiencing any serious obstacles, except for the fortified checkpoints of the Russian army. And suddenly they saw that clouds of thick smoke did not rise above it, perhaps for the first time in a month. Russian troops pulled up large-caliber artillery to this area, and the paratroopers at the airfield for once got a respite.
Free travel to Irpen and Bucha. However, it is too early to talk about the full control of the Russians over this city. In Bucha, the troops of the Russian Federation are now completely surrounded by a unit of nationalists. The blockade of the Russian military there is the same propaganda trick as the “great Ilovaisk victory” of 2014 and the “big Debaltsevo redeployment” in 2015. In the absence of real successes at the front, virtual victories are simulated for the Ukrainian audience, as in the settlement of Makarov, from which the Russian troops were allegedly knocked out. But they didn't take him completely.
Meanwhile, in the Kharkiv region, according to the Russian Defense Ministry, Russian units took control of the city of Izyum. And this opens the way to blocking the enemy grouping in the Donbass from the North. From Izium there is a road to Slavyansk. This means that the entire former "ATO zone" may soon be in the "cauldron".
Aleksandr Kots is prior service Russian airborne and a writer for Komsomol Pravda