Information war for Crimea continues

Last week the head of Crimea Sergey Aksenov published a new hashtag on social networks – #CrimeaRussiaForever. He believes that this should be a response to the policy of social networks which present the peninsula as a part of Ukraine. The mayor of Yalta supported the head of the region. He not only took a picture of himself against the background of the patriotic hashtag, but also stated: “All the thoughtless statements by some people, especially politicians on the other side of the border, are nonsense and have goals which are foreign to us. This also concerns some Internet users who try to destabilize the situation in Crimea, according to someone’s political orders, stating groundless and short-sighted views. We, residents of Yalta, stand against this. Crimea is Russian forever.”

A construction of the words #CrimeaRussiaForever has already been built on the Yalta seafront near Lenin’s monument, and now it will go to other cities of Crimea. Until February 17th it will visit all the administrative centers in all the municipal districts and city districts of the peninsula.

The unity of Crimea and the rest of Russia has had to be demonstrated by popular youth means since 2014, when residents of the peninsula voted to join Russia in a referendum after the state coup in Ukraine. The majority of Western countries called it an annexing of Crimea. Russia believes that this is an element of the information war and tries to explain its point of view to the West.

Recently, Mateusz Piskorski, a Polish journalist, returned from Crimea. He visited the region at the invitation of the Russian-Polish Center for Dialogue and Consent.

“Unfortunately, most of the media, including the Polish media, are involved in this information war and, unfortunately, the majority of the Polish media fulfill certain orders, say, of their Western partners, and often their owners, given the fact that many Polish media, and many Polish TV stations are governed by direct foreign and American capital,” Piskorski said.

He managed to meet the leadership of the region. “We met with two Deputy Prime Ministers of the Republic, Dmitriy Anatolyevich Polonsky and Ruslan Balbec. From our point of view, the meeting with Ruslan Balbec and his staff was particularly interesting, as we discussed issues related to interethnic and interreligious relations in Crimea. These issues are very interesting, because, unfortunately, the picture that is transmitted to us through the media that dominate in the Western countries, in the EU, lies in the fact that it has tried to be instilled in us that there is a conflict mainly between the Crimean Tatars and the administration of the Republic that is violating the rights of certain religious and ethnic communities,” the Polish journalist stated.

“Talking to representatives of the Crimean Tatar people and other ethnic communities, including Poles, we saw that in fact only now has Crimea become a multinational territory, a multicultural, multi-religious territory, where the rights of everybody are respected, all languages, including the Ukrainian minorities, including the Ukrainian community. And the Crimeans, almost all those with whom we met, regardless of their social status, regardless of their nationality, finally feel themselves to be citizens of a fully-fledged state. They feel a guarantee in terms of social policy, economic guarantees, in terms of security, basic security, feel guarantees, and feel that they have the civil rights that they were deprived of for 25 years after the peninsula joined Ukraine,” Mateusz Piskorski believes.

The main problem is a lack of information, the lack of an objective picture and media bias: “In the framework of the Forum's independent media we will be able in the future to cover Crimea and other regions of the Russian Federation, to transmit an objective picture of events that highlight the political situation, to communicate with the citizens of the Russian Federation in different regions, and thus fulfill the role that must comply with the state institutions of the Republic of Poland, which, unfortunately, at the moment, they do not want or refuse to facilitate communication between our two peoples, between our civic society institutions,” the journalist said.