During this spring the western media has continuously asked me the same questions, country to country and from interview to interview:
What does Putin want?
What is the next country that will come under attack? Who is the next one?
These two questions include already the presumption that Russia will never return Crimea to Ukraine. I say this because no journalist has asked me once when the invasion of Crimea will end and it seems to me they don’t ask about it because they already believe it never happens and I’m sure, if everyone is made to believe so, it indeed never happens. They don’t ask about it also because they no longer follow the story of Crimean invasion, their interest in that story disappeared soon after the peninsula was illegally annexed to Russia. Perhaps the traditional dramaturgy of Western news journalism is to be blamed –it follows always the figure who has given their face to the incident, in this case Putin, and that made him the protagonist of the story. And when his focus intentionally turned to other subject matters, the media followed his gaze, leaving Crimea behind. Or did the public eye forgot the peninsula because the buzz was already in the Eastern Ukraine offering more visible action, easy to sell, and by doing so they followed Moscow’s wishes?
Or is the reason for loosing interest the cruel fact that West don’t know Crimean peninsula well enough to care and most of the people have never visited the place? Would the reception be different, if the protogonist of the invasion was no Putin, but a Crimean tatar who was forced to leave his home and flee to other parts of Ukraine? Or if the protagonist was a local high school student who is not allowed to study in his native language anymore?
Or can we simply blame the fact that Russia has made it very hard to get the news coverage from Crimea, at least for Western media? Or it is because Western media didn’t start to follow Crimean events before the situation was already very heated so they actually didn’t get the beginning of the invasion which actually happened a long time go. Russia started to send the agents of influence to the territory a way back and changing the attitude into anti-Ukraine and anti-Western has been under process for years. That is the story Western media missed, but it was a story that should’ve been covered at least later on.
The image of how a country is invaded and what happens in the country before and after that, would provide the readers information about the fact that an occupation is always preceded by psychological campaigns of hatred and after the occupation it’s always accompanied by mental occupation, changing of public values and educational content, sweeping the culture of the native inhabitants off the map.
