Local government officials in this city in southern Ukraine, which has been controlled by Russian troops for the past two weeks, have been kicked out of their offices, and the local radio station plays Soviet ballads and Russian pop songs, interspersed with excerpts from Vladimir Putin’s speeches and news items about Ukraine being “liberated from Nazis”.

“We feel like we’re living a nightmare, and we don’t know when this awful dream will end,” said one local councillor in the city, who asked to remain anonymous, citing security fears. “We still can’t believe that this could have happened.”…

Many older residents of the region felt disfranchised in modern Ukraine, but these views have been changing gradually over the past decade, and then rapidly during the last two weeks of the Russian attack on Ukraine.

“Of course, there are some fans of the ‘Russian world’ among the population, but every day they are fewer and fewer. People can see that the ‘Russian world’ is not what Russian propaganda promises. It’s poverty, violence and destruction,” said Anna Ukrainska, a schoolteacher in Berdyansk.