Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. This weekend, Russians lined up to cast their votes in a so-called presidential election.

Reporter 1: President Vladimir Putin declaring he's been re-elected for a fifth term after only token opposition.

Reporter 2: It certainly wasn't a contest, it was stage-managed so that Vladimir Putin was the only real candidate on the ballot.

Reporter 3: Russian officials say, he won the election with 87% of the votes.

Reporter 4: Western countries have condemned the election as neither free nor fair. The US has just called it incredibly undemocratic.

Brooke Gladstone: In Russian state media, a different story. Interviews with election observers saying the vote had gone smoothly with no violations and boasts about Putin as an example of how it's done. We saw pictures of happy voters queuing up in the four regions of Ukraine illegally occupied by Russia since the full-scale invasion in 2022; Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia.

Authorities say that Putin won huge victories in the territories that he now calls New Russia, 88% in Kherson, 93% in Zaporizhzhia, 94% in Luhansk, and more than 95% in Donetsk. Early voting in these regions started in late February, and according to reporting in The Washington Post, election officials accompanied by armed soldiers went door to door threatening repercussions for those who refused to vote. Those tactics were a replay of Russia's illegal 2022 referendum on whether those four occupied territories wanted to be annexed by Russia.

Micah Loewinger: State TV showed scripted and staged celebrations and some retail politicking, but this is the reality of what the US and allies today called a sham. A soldier precedes a poll worker carrying a box of ballots. The occupied literally voting at gunpoint.

Brooke Gladstone: Across the four regions, between 87% and 99% voted to be annexed.

Shaun Walker: Was obviously a fairly farcical way to conduct a vote.

Brooke Gladstone: Shaun Walker is The Guardian's Central and Eastern Europe correspondent. He led an investigation into life under Russian occupation in Zaporizhzhia. Through dozens of interviews and leaked papers from the Kremlin, he traced the battle for hearts and minds in Zaporizhzhia, including the effort to get out the vote.

Shaun Walker: The first pictures of the voting, which is election officials coming into people's home with a ballot box and accompanied by a soldier in full camouflage equipment carrying a machine gun, tells you everything you need to know about these elections.

Brooke Gladstone: You went to Zaporizhzhia, which is the capital of an area that is largely Russian-occupied, but this capital is not. What did the Russian army do to local leaders when they took each town they took in the Zaporizhzhia region?

Shaun Walker: Generally what happened was that the army and the FSB would detain the head of the town and make a combination of an offer and a threat. You should work with us, you should declare that you are in support of Russian power, otherwise, bad things will happen.

I met with the mayor of a small town called Molochansk, which had about 12,000 residents prior to the war. The mayor there, who's Iryna Lypka, told me that for the first few weeks, there were some soldiers around, they could see that there was a military presence, but the Russians were busy in the bigger towns and essentially they just carried on working, trying to get food to people. The Ukrainian flag was still flying outside the council and there was this strange double power period where the Ukrainian mayor was in charge and the Russian army was stationed on the outskirts. Then after a few weeks the Russians got around to working out what to do with these smaller towns. She was essentially kidnapped from her office.

Brooke Gladstone: Not just her but her driver, her secretary, her assistants, and she was held in an airless cell for 24 days.

Shaun Walker: The way she told this story, she was taken upstairs every night for interrogations. There was a group of guys in balclavas and they would basically say, "We want you to publicly say you're going to work with us." She had no access to the internet or to a telephone or to news, so she had no idea what was happening. These Russians said to her, "Look, Kyiv has fallen, Ukraine has fallen. The whole country is controlled by Russia now, you've got nothing to lose by working with us, but if you reject us, we will send you to Siberia, you'll be put on trial for anti-Russian agitation and you can spend the rest of your life in prison if you like."

Brooke Gladstone: Your article quotes her saying, "I had hallucinations. I started hearing my children's voices." She was thinking, "What would I do if my son was tortured in front of me?" She was hearing the sound of torture all around her in this jail. After 24 days, she was released, and then she fled for the Ukrainian-controlled territory.

Shaun Walker: Eventually, they realized they weren't going to be able to turn her. They told her they would release her if she signed a couple of papers promising that she wouldn't do anything anti-Russian, which she signed. She said, "I figured that I would just stay there and live quietly," but after two weeks she said she realized that she just couldn't live under this occupation and so she left. She's now sitting in this office with some of her staff, which has been one room of a college in the city of Zaporizhzhia where you have a whole bunch of these exiled towns.

Brooke Gladstone: Mayors in exile.

Shaun Walker: Exactly.

Brooke Gladstone: If the local mayors didn't agree to cooperate, the Russians would find someone else, but who would they find?

Shaun Walker: This is one of the very interesting parts of the occupation, and it's really a repeat of the Russian playbook from Crimea 10 years ago, or in the majority of public-facing roles, they will find local Ukrainian collaborators. The mayors, the people who appear on TV, the people who talk about their plans for the region, they're usually Ukrainians, anyone from former politicians to completely random people.

Then when you dig a bit deeper, you see the people that are really making the decisions, the people that are rounding up the so-called hostile elements are brought in from Russia. The FSB security services, the Investigative Committee, which is a very powerful body that in some way is a bit like the FBI in the US, police, senior judges, all of these people are coming from different regions of Russia.

This is not always public. Some of these figures do appear publicly, but what we did as part of our investigation was to run through some of the stories on the new local propaganda news sites that the Russians have set up and to run the photos of people that appeared there through facial recognition software. Whenever we saw people who were from the Investigative Committee or from the FSB, we could never trace them to Ukraine and we could often trace them to Russia.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote about the deportations and kidnappings in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. There was an official deportation policy between July 2022 and May 2023. What did it look like?

Shaun Walker: You have these very chilling videos where you see a military guy with his face fully covered, standing in a military checkpoint, talking to somebody.

Military Guy: [foreign language]

Shaun Walker: Often quite an elderly person, middle-aged woman, middle-aged man, pensioners even, basically reading them from a piece of paper that you've been accused of being a threat to Russian organs of power. The punishment is you're being deported from the territory of Zaporizhzhia region. Then they send these people to walk across the front line-

Military Guy: [foreign language]

Shaun Walker: -without any possessions, and if they're lucky, they made it to Ukrainian-controlled territory. The Russians were proud of this policy. They made the videos public. It was perhaps partly to scare other people into being quiet. When the Russian-installed governor of Zaporizhzhia Region was talking about this policy a few weeks ago, he actually portrayed it as a humanitarian measure.

He said, "Well if you have a woman with three kids and she doesn't support Russian rule, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to kill her? We decided the best thing to do to avoid bloodshed would be simply to deport these people." Amazing way to talk about your own war crimes. This policy stopped in the summer of 2023, not necessarily out of any notions that it may be inhumane, but because they said, "We're losing a valuable resource here, it'll be much better for us to arrest them and use them in prisoner exchanges."

Brooke Gladstone: You say that the Russians have really caused huge scars by doing this.

Shaun Walker: It's a story that often gets lost in the military reporting and the talk about territory, the psychological scars that this leaves. Because yes, you have clear cases of people who collaborated, perhaps put Ukrainian lives at risk, and by Ukrainian law are criminals. Then you have clear cases of people who staunchly supported Ukraine, maybe survived torture, or came out to protest during the occupation.

Then you have a lot of people in the middle. This will be a particularly tricky question if and when Ukraine regains control of where are those blurry lines between surviving and collaborating. What is a crime, what is something that could be morally judged and what is a totally normal action for a person living in their hometown and trying to survive now that Russia's appeared and told you it's part of Russia?

Brooke Gladstone: You've been documenting a battle for hearts and minds in Zaporizhzhia, you got your hands on a cache of internal Kremlin financial documents. What did that tell you about the deployment of propaganda efforts there?

Shaun Walker: There were two parts to this. One was to block the previous Ukrainian sources and there was also money allocated to Roskomnadzor, which is the Russian internet watchdog in these new regions, to block undesirable websites. Then there was a whole tranche of money that was allocated to set up new outlets. In the Zaporizhzhia region, there was four outlets specified. I focused on one of them, which was a website called zaporizhzhia.ru.

These documents had the budget down to the last ruble for three journalists, for setting up Telegram channels, which is a big way that people communicate in Ukraine, for paying influencers to put content on Instagram.

Brooke Gladstone: These are mostly Russians coming in?

Shaun Walker: The journalists come from Russia. The news is all about how happy everybody is to be part of Russia. Just to give you one example, I was reading an article on this website, zaporizhzhia.ru. The Zaporizhzhia head of the Russian Journalists Union was expressing her delights that they'd received a delivery of 10 sets of body armor, flak jackets, and she said, "Our local journalists will be able to work in much more safe conditions."

I decided to go and look at the background of this woman who's been quoted about our local journalists in Zaporizhzhia. Until two years ago she was the editor of a very small newspaper in the Russian provinces, one of these many people that have been shipped in since this annexation, whether it's journalists, teachers, judges, police, et cetera. Basically, part of an occupying authority.

Brooke Gladstone: In the weeks leading up to this election, Russian officials were going house to house to check on whether some were empty and could be resettled and pressuring Ukrainians who hadn't done so to take up Russian citizenship.

Shaun Walker: When you're living on occupied territory, the longer that you go without having a Russian passport, the harder it is to do anything. We've seen this in Crimea. For the first few years there were some people who were refusing to take those passports but wanted to stay living there. At a certain point it became impossible because you can't access healthcare, you can't access education, you can't get a pension, you can't do anything without having the citizenship.

Of course, in these newly occupied territories, we're at an earlier stage and there are many people who are sitting and hoping that the Ukrainians are going to retake the territory soon, "Why would I need to get a Russian passport?" As the time ticks on and Russia remains in control, it's again getting harder and harder to be able to function there. It's even harder to leave the territory now if you don't have a Russian passport.

There was a woman that I met denied permission to leave with her Ukrainian passport. She'd taken a Russian passport in order to be able to leave. To get that she'd had to go and stand underneath a portrait of Vladimir Putin and sing the Russian national anthem. There's this real pressure that people should take these Russian passports. That of course also means that the Kremlin can then say that these are Russian citizens and that if Ukraine starts taking back territory on the battlefield, it has another argument why it needs to "defend" these people because the Kremlin is now defending Russian citizens.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote that the four partially occupied Ukrainian regions played a special role in the messaging for Putin's regime.

Shaun Walker: The Kremlin has found it really difficult to get the messaging right about this war, and if you follow the way they talk about it, it's quite sort of up and down.

Brooke Gladstone: Well it was a war against the Nazis in Ukraine. It was a war against NATO. It was a war against the godless West in general, and it's a war to protect Russia from the forces gathering on its borders.

Shaun Walker: The original reason for starting this war, aside from all of the NATO and existential and fight with the West, was to protect the Russian speakers living in the east and south of Ukraine. That was always nonsense but that was technically the reason this war started. For Russians who might be sitting at home and thinking, "What the hell are we doing in the third year of a war in Ukraine, Russian soldiers dying all the time?" Okay. Actually, look, I just watched TV and it turns out there are hundreds of thousands of people who are living in this terrible oppressive Ukrainian regime, and now they're delighted to be part of Russia. I think that's the message.

Brooke Gladstone: Putin is still reportedly a very popular leader. Why does he need to do all of this messaging? Why does he need to employ these regions that you reported on in this way?

Shaun Walker: It's undeniable, yes, Putin is very popular, but untangling how much of that popularity is down to exactly the fact that he controls the message so intensely in Russia and that that's something that in the last few years has really escalated from this soft, selective authoritarianism that characterized the first years of his reign to something much, much more aggressive, darker, more sinister, more all-embracing.

Let's not forget that Putin made this pretty dramatic decision in September 2022 that he was going to say that these four regions, none of which Russia fully controlled militarily then, and none of them he fully controls militarily now, are part of Russia. It's now in the constitution that these regions are part of Russia, even though Zaporizhia, the city, Kherson, the city, they've never been controlled by Russia.

I think it's important to show that things are under control, that this war that was meant to last a few days and is now lasting more than two years is for a good reason, that these territories are part of Russia, that people there are happy, and that if you're wondering why your cousin, or your father, or your friend, or the guy you knew from work has been sent to sit in a trench in Ukraine, well, here at least is some reason. It's an important element of showing that this is not a futile war.

Brooke Gladstone: Shaun, thank you very much.

Shaun Walker: Thank you so much for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Shaun Walker reports on Ukraine for The Guardian.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media's produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang with help from Shaan Merchant.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director's Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Andrew Nerviano and Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger.

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