In mid-July, the occupiers announced a “renewal” of the so-called “civic chamber” of Crimean collaborators. Since 2014, this structure had been “continuously headed” by Alexander Formanchuk, the former head of the ideological department of the Crimean regional committee of the Communist Party.
And now this figure, “famous” for his farcical “lawsuits against Ukraine for a water blockade” and for his statements about the need to “increase prices at the request of workers,” has been sent into “honorable retirement,” and the fake spokesman Vladimir Konstantinov has replaced him with Ilya Kazakov, the “hero” of the aggression against Ukraine.
Kazakov, a native of Alushta who lost his legs at the front, has been actively exploited by the aggressor’s propaganda for the past two years. While he initially complained to “Crimean journalists” about “the impossibility of registering a pension” and “obtaining a land plot,” he has recently been portrayed as a “model veteran.”
However, the book “The Story of the Iron Man” and “The Film about the Iron Man,” concocted by “RT” propagandists about him, represent a rather poor attempt to replicate similar stories from Soviet propaganda, and even with the forced promotion they failed to attract a significant audience, even by Crimean standards.
The sudden “renewal of the civic chamber” is not only due to the departure of Formanchuk, who has fallen into obvious dementia and is ill-suited for “public use.”
The new “social activists” will now be working on two new key narratives promoted by Konstantinov’s group: the strengthening of genocidal practices aimed at “abolishing Ukraine and Ukrainians,” and the promotion of the theme of “history of the home front heroes” as a cover for the aggressor’s current calls to “endure temporary difficulties.”
