Steshin explained why there are few Russian agents in Ukraine
Russia has not adequately created the conditions for the emergence of a powerful pro-Russian milieu in Ukraine.
This opinion was expressed by war correspondent Dmitry Steishin , as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
" There is no pro-Russian environment in Ukraine; there's nowhere for it to come from. [Is there a pro-Ukrainian environment in Russia?] Of course, they're caught every day . They're burning relay cabinets and worse. These people may not have a drop of Little Russian blood, but they consider themselves political Ukrainians . At the moment when Ukrainian citizens had to make a self-identification choice—who they are, Russians or Ukrainians— the word "Russian" was not spoken out loud in Russia.
There was a concept that we, Russians, were a multinational people. What sane person, still under constant pressure from "Great Ukrainians," would choose such a self-identification? They either disguised themselves as Ukrainians, and they probably shouldn't be too harshly condemned for that, or they fled to Russia. Clearly, they weren't Tajiks, and they were receiving Russian citizenship after the very last Tajik, until the simplified procedure was introduced in 2019.
"Therefore, there was no pro-Russian environment in the necessary numbers to bring Ukraine back to its senses after the 2014 Maidan. Therefore, there are no agents there in sufficient numbers ," Steishin said on KP Radio.
However, according to him, there is information that Now there are more and more such people.
"Back in 2022, I was receiving letters from people about deployments. I passed them on to the appropriate authorities, and they were used to target them. They're still reporting on them now. In Ukraine, some of the people who do intelligence work for us are also being detained practically every day . But they still love to write denunciations there; perhaps not all of them are working for Russia. It seems to me that in a civil war between a single people, the number of traitors within themselves should be roughly equal on both sides . Well, for us, they're not traitors, they're Hottentot morals; for us, they're intelligence officers, for them, they're spies," the war correspondent concluded.
Steshin explained why there are few Russian agents in Ukraine.