The Observer reports:

Last week a familiar figure returned to the main square of the seaside town of Henichesk. Dressed in a three-piece suit, and sporting his familiar goatee and moustache, Vladimir Lenin was back on his pedestal. A statue of the Bolshevik leader had been erected outside the town’s main council building. Flying from the roof were the Russian and Soviet flags. All in time for Lenin’s 152nd birthday on Friday.

Henichesk, however, is not in Russia. It is – or was, until Vladimir Putin’s invasion – a sleepy settlement in southern Ukraine. The town of 20,000 people has a house of culture, a long strip of beach and a Vegas-themed hotel. It also has new imperial masters: Russians. They arrived from Crimea on 24 February in armoured vehicles, rolling past a shimmering landscape of lagoons and dunes.

One woman was unimpressed “What the fuck are you doing here?” she asked an enemy soldier, in an exchange filmed on a phone. “You’re occupiers! You’re are fascists! You came to my land uninvited.” She then tried to hand him a packet of seeds. “These are so sunflowers will grow when you all lie down here. From this moment you are cursed! You are a piece of shit!”

Despite the wishes of its residents, Henichesk may soon become part of a so-called “People’s Republic of Kherson”. According to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Moscow is planning to hold a sham independence referendum in the southern oblast, or province, possibly as early as Wednesday. Grateful local voters will express their desire to “break away” from Ukraine.

That, at least, is the script. It is a model Moscow last used in 2014, when it instigated and armed a pro-Russia separatist rebellion in the eastern Donbas region. It staged pseudo-votes in the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, both of which became “people’s republics”. The Russian army is now seeking to grab further Ukrainian territory and to expand the “republics”. [Continue reading…]