It begins with what sounds like a hopeful development: a ceasefire in Oleshky, the Russian-occupied town in Ukraine’s Kherson region, reportedly starting on October 29. But for anyone who has followed this war closely, the announcement is less a cause for celebration than a signal to pay attention. Oleshky and the surrounding communities have endured a humanitarian catastrophe that Moscow refuses to own. The town has been cut off, starved, and terrorized, and now the Kremlin is looking for a way to repair its image. The ceasefire, in other words, is not simply about stopping bullets or giving civilians a breather. It is also a public relations move. Understanding how the Kremlin operates in moments like this is crucial. As the technical details of the evacuation are being worked out, the global community should be bracing for a controlled press tour of the occupied part of the Kherson region. The pattern is old and familiar: create or exploit a disaster, blame Ukraine for it, then present Russia as the only source of mercy and order in the middle of the chaos it caused.
Before any of that happens, it is worth remembering what is actually true on the ground in Oleshky. Ukrainian civilians have been trapped there, caught on the wrong side of the Dnipro River, cut off from their own country by Russian forces. For months, the 34th Separate Marine Brigade “Borysfen” has been trying to save them. Ukrainian troops have been delivering food and essential supplies across the river by drone, because Russia has blocked every conventional humanitarian route. These drones are not weapons. They are lifelines. And Russian forces have shot them down. They have confiscated supplies meant for starving people. They have made it as difficult as possible for civilians to survive, and then they have turned around and blamed Ukraine for the suffering. Russia’s propaganda machine has been busy from the start. Kremlin-funded media have already begun gaslighting the world, shifting responsibility for the crisis onto Ukraine and its military. On October 7, Ukraine’s Security Service warned that Russian occupiers were preparing a series of “compromising” interviews with local residents. According to the intelligence, soldiers from one of the occupying units had been ordered to stage videos in which residents would accuse Ukrainian forces of shelling the town and enforcing a blockade. The residents would also be pushed to criticize Ukraine’s military and political leadership and express gratitude toward the Russian military. And true to form, one of the Kremlin’s most prominent propagandists, Margarita Simonyan, has already shared a video of Oleshky residents doing exactly that—accusing Ukrainian forces of carrying out the attacks. It is a grotesque inversion of reality, but it is also textbook Kremlin strategy.
The trick does not end with social media videos. Moscow knows that to convince the world, it needs the appearance of independent journalism. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022, the Kremlin has organized controlled press tours of occupied Ukrainian territory. Journalists, bloggers, and influencers are presented as independent foreign correspondents, but their trips are carefully arranged by Russian state structures. They are taken to preselected locations, introduced to pre-interviewed witnesses, and shown scenes that have been staged in advance. The resulting reports are shaped to support the Kremlin’s version of events. Russia did this in Mariupol. It has done it repeatedly around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. It has done it in other occupied Ukrainian cities. These are not simple media visits. They are organized international influence operations. In a 2024 report, Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service documented how Russian intelligence services used state agencies and Kremlin-linked organizations to recruit foreign journalists, bloggers, and influencers for trips to occupied Ukrainian territory. The Kremlin arranged and financed the trips, and in some cases even paid participants to produce favorable reports. The goal, the report states plainly, is to reshape Western public attitudes and undermine support for Ukraine. So when a ceasefire is announced in Oleshky, the international community should not expect accountability. It should expect a Potemkin village, painstakingly built to obscure the crime.
This is not speculation. The Kremlin has been running the same playbook since the earliest months of the war, and the evidence is overwhelming. In Mariupol, a city that became a byword for Russian brutality, Russian forces destroyed bridges, damaged railways, blocked food deliveries, and cut off evacuation routes. The conditions they created were exactly the kind of humanitarian catastrophe now seen in Oleshky. Then, having trapped civilians in the city, Russian propaganda began claiming that Ukrainian troops were preventing evacuations and using civilians as human shields. When Russian warplanes bombed the Mariupol maternity hospital, Kremlin-controlled media said the attack had been staged by Ukraine. They claimed that injured pregnant women were actresses. The Russian Embassy in London amplified those lies, suggesting that photographs of the victims were fake. When a Russian airstrike destroyed the Mariupol Drama Theater, where hundreds of civilians had been sheltering, Russian propagandists quickly blamed Ukrainian soldiers, saying that Azov fighters had blown up the building themselves and taken civilians hostage. By June 2022, Russian television was broadcasting guided tours of the theater’s ruins, with a guide serenely blaming “Ukrainian Nazis” for the destruction. At the same time, occupation authorities spoke about resuming performances at the destroyed theater, pretending that the city was being restored to normal life. This is the pattern: deny, blame, distract, and paint Russia as the rescuer.
The same logic was applied across Ukraine, in city after city. In Kherson, Russian occupation forces brought in people from Crimea and occupied Donbas to stage a demonstration in support of a so-called “Kherson People’s Republic.” While doing that, they blocked humanitarian aid, deliberately creating a crisis so that Russian troops could then pose as saviors handing out food. This weaponization of hunger is not new. It has deep roots in Soviet and Russian state practice, going back to Stalin’s Holodomor, the man-made famine that devastated Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. In March 2022, Russian media claimed that Ukrainian forces had committed mass killings near a railway in Popasna, in the Luhansk region, and used civilians as human shields. No evidence was ever provided, and local residents did not confirm the story. That same month, Russia’s Ministry of Defense organized a press tour in occupied Donbas called “Za Pravdu,” or “For Truth,” bringing foreign journalists to document alleged atrocities by Ukrainian “neo-Nazis.” A U.S. State Department assessment described these as “Potemkin Village Press Tours of the Donbas,” noting that pro-Kremlin activists were being presented as independent foreign journalists. In April, a Russian missile strike on the Kramatorsk railway station killed more than fifty civilians who had gathered to evacuate. Russian propaganda immediately blamed Ukraine, circulating contradictory theories: that it was a Ukrainian provocation, an accidental strike, defective ammunition, or an attack on disloyal civilians. Notably, Russia’s RIA Novosti published its story about the explosion before eyewitness reports even appeared. And when the world saw the bodies of murdered civilians in Bucha, Russian authorities claimed the massacre had been staged by Ukraine and Western media, despite Reuters investigating and identifying Russian military units that had been present during the occupation.
Every time the Russian military leaves behind death and destruction, the Kremlin tries to rewrite the story in real time. In July 2022, after an explosion killed Ukrainian prisoners of war in Olenivka, Russian propaganda claimed that Ukrainian forces had deliberately attacked their own soldiers with American HIMARS rockets. International investigators were not granted access, but that did not stop the lies from spreading. In September, after mass graves were discovered in the liberated city of Izium, pro-Kremlin outlets again insisted that Ukraine had staged the evidence of atrocities. The same story was told after the discovery of mass graves in Bucha, and it will be told again about Oleshky unless the world refuses to accept the narrative at face value. That is what makes the next phase so dangerous. The ceasefire in Oleshky—reportedly brokered with Melania Trump playing an unexpected diplomatic role—must be more than a plot twist in Russian information warfare. It must actually provide Ukrainian civilians with food, medicine, and safe evacuation. It must not serve as a stage for Moscow to rewrite history or win sympathy abroad. The people of Oleshky have suffered enough without being turned into props in another cynical production. The global community needs to watch closely, demand accountability, and refuse to be fooled by a carefully staged press tour. The responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe in Oleshky belongs squarely to Russia. No amount of propaganda, no orchestra of selected witnesses, and no supposedly independent journalists on a Kremlin-sponsored trip should be allowed to obscure that fact.