Several Russian TV channels no longer broadcast weather information for the annexed areas of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia. Their capital cities disappeared from the maps overnight. An example of this is the NTV channel, which belongs to the gas giant Gazprom-Media.
The news continues to surprise us, especially when last September Vladimir Putin called the pseudo-referendums in which he claimed victory and reaffirmed “overwhelmingly” the will of the population of those territories to join the Russian Federation and are part of its borders, as the president explained. An issue condemned by the international community.
Curiously, however, since November 9, the NTV channel has been stealing from ‘its’ citizens to find out what the weather will be like in their places of residence. Especially when it comes to one of the news that arouses the most interest and has the most listeners in all media, especially on television.
It so happens that 9 November was a very significant date, as Russian forces abandoned Kherson on that day, unable to deal with the Kiev offensive. A crucial event in this ‘special military operation’ as Moscow euphemistically calls the invasion of Ukraine, which marks a before and after in the war. Until then, weather information was offered, according to images broadcast by NTV collected by Nexta, a Belarusian channel distributed via Telegram and YouTube.
another inconsistency
The fact that Moscow has overnight erased from the (weather) map the capitals of the annexed territories which are included in the Constitution It is not understandable. Could it be that in practice he gives them up for lost? It’s a trap? A ploy? Only the Kremlin knows.
The truth is, once Russian forces left Kherson in order not to risk soldiers’ lives, as Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu put it, the Kremlin stressed that it “will have remained Russian.”
Thus, the presidential spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, specified that, in addition to not considering the withdrawal of troops humiliating, he insisted on the fact that this territory “is part of the Russian Federation and will continue to be so”, excluding any change in its status from the decision of Moscow to annex it together with Donetsk, Lugansk and Zaporizhia -which is reflected in the graphs of the time as Melitópol, since they hadn’t completely conquered the oblast-. “Its (Kherson) status is legally defined and fixed. There are no changes and there cannot be,” Peskov said.
Be that as it may, the reason for the disappearance of these areas from weather maps is not understood and results in an inconsistency. One more of Putin’s many.
