The first days of Russia's war against Ukraine did not go well for the Ukrainian side. The Russian army invaded Ukrainian territory through unprotected sections of the border and quickly began to advance deep into the country. It seemed a good time for supporters of the so-called "Russian peace" to greet the so-called "liberators" with flowers. As the Kremlin propagandists promised over the past eight years.

But the reality turned out to be one that the aggressors never expected.

First of all, we see a significant difference from the operation to annex Crimea in 2014, when a significant part of the Ukrainian army stationed there surrendered its positions without a fight, and some of them even went over to the side of the invaders. None of this was even close to happening in late February or early March 2022. In contrast to Crimea 2014, there was NOT ONE instance of an organized defection of Ukrainian soldiers to the side of the occupier. Somewhere in the first days after the sudden attack there was confusion, disorganisation, but not betrayal. Although the Kremlin propagandists, the same Simonyans, Kosayans and Babayans assured that the Ukrainian army was only afraid of certain "Banderites" "and "Nazis" and as soon as Russian troops cut off the Ukrainian border, they would gladly go over to their side.

An even bigger "surprise" for the invaders was the reaction of the local population, including the Russian-speaking and generally ethnically Russian population. There were no "flowers" at all, at best poorly concealed hostility and sabotage, and in many places unarmed people came out and tried to block the way for the tanks.

Moreover, of the mayors of the cities seized in the first days, only the mayor of the small town of Kupyansk in the Kharkov region agreed to cooperate with the occupation, and in his speech to the citizens he "excused himself" and made it clear that he did so forcedly and under pressure. And this is in the regions bordering Russia, where the population is linked to its neighbours in Russia by thousands of kinship ties and which previously were mostly pro-Russian. So what will happen when the occupation army advances further to the west? Obviously, resistance will grow.

And here questions immediately arose to those who for more than 8 years have spent huge budgets to supposedly support "the pro-Russian movement" and pro-Russian forces in Ukraine. After all, they promised a "triumphant march of the occupiers and their meeting as "liberators" - and it was for the preparation of this "meeting" that they received huge sums of money from the Russian state budget.

First and foremost, of course, certain figures have become "rich" by creating supposedly "Russian movements" in Ukraine, as well as all kinds of organisations of a separatist nature. As a rule, they were guided by the "models" of Transnistria, Abkhazia, so-called "South Ossetia" and so-called "Artsakh" - i.e. the separatist projects of the Armenian lobby. As it turned out, the money was allocated and "disbursed" but the result was zero!

As a result, after the first days of the war, Russia was already looking for "guilty" for the failure of the blitzkrieg in Ukraine and the absence of the promised "flowers".

Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed Dmitry Shalkov, head of the Control and Revision Department of the Presidential Administration, Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Russian Investigative Committee, Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov and Sergey Korolev, First Deputy Director of the FSB, to conduct a thorough inspection of the funds that were allocated for "pro-Russian" (and actually subversive) activities in Ukraine and the formation of a "fifth column" in 2014-2022.

The most interesting information is about who the main suspects are.

The main handlers of the Ukrainian direction, who have been responsible for destabilising Ukraine over the past eight years, are suspected of embezzling funds.

Among them:

-former Russian presidential aide Vladislav Surkov;

-former head of the Department for Cultural and Public Relations with the Near Abroad, General Vladimir Chernov;

-Chernov's successor in office, Igor Maslov;

-Chief of the 5th Service of the FSB, General Sergei Beseda;

-Evgeny Primakov, head of Rossotrudnichestvo;

-former supervisors of Ukrainian affairs at the Ministry of Economic Development, Mikhail Babich and Yana Lantratova;

-Inal Ardzinba, the current foreign minister of Abkhazia and others.

Putin believes that these individuals have failed to develop the Ukrainian direction properly and therefore the current invasion has met with resistance rather than support from the Ukrainian population.

In total, these individuals are suspected of "absorbing" some $5 billion and of passing blatant disinformation to the Russian leadership, on the basis of which the decision to send in troops was made.

The allocated funds were allegedly used to finance a network of "pro-Russian activists", organise roundtables and campaign activities, but were in fact simply embezzled.

However, Putin openly suspected that the money spent was used to create a powerful network of opposition-minded individuals who were just waiting for the Russians to come and "liberate" them from the oppression of the "fascists".

In Putin's mind there were initiative groups to create new "people's republics", agents among nationalists, etc. In reality, none of this turned up. And there could not have been any in principle.

The fact is that at the instigation of the same Surkov, all the allocated funds of the Ukrainian "curators" were spent through the corrupt top brass of the separatist entities that had already "worked" with them - the same regimes in Sukhumi and Tskhinvali, the DPR and LPR. However, the lion's share went to Armenian structures which lobbied for the separatist so-called "Artsakh".

It is enough to look at the pro-Armenian resources focused on supposedly "pro-Russian propaganda" in the post-Soviet space, in Ukraine for example. There, much more is written about "Artsakh" and Armenian "suffering" and "greatness" than about Ukraine and the Ukrainians.

The question is why does a Ukrainian, even a Russian-speaking one, care about "Artsakh" and some mythical "suffering of the Armenian people"? Why should a Ukrainian give up Crimea just on the basis of Armenian nationalist crap about "Artsakh is Armenia"?  Who did they want to agitate in this way? All the more so since even a pro-Russian activist in Ukraine could not get even a tiny part of the funding allocated unless he belonged to an "ancient and long-suffering nation".

It is very symbolic that in the "merry company" of embezzlers of the Russian budget to support pro-Russian and separatist movements in Ukraine there is the name of the current head of the separatist so-called "Foreign Ministry of Abkhazia" Inal Ardzinba. On the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine the separatist showed great promise.  He was summoned to Moscow by the Kremlin's chief propagandist Margarita Simonyan and it was announced that an information centre was to be established in the occupied Sukhumi.

Kavkazplus has already written about this in an article "Margarita Simonyan is creating an Armenian propaganda media centre in Sukhumi" (http://kavkazplus.com/news.php?id=35538).  The centre, which operates in the interests of Armenian nationalists, was clearly funded at the expense of money allocated to "Ukrainian direction".

And then it turned out that Inal Ardzinba is a common thief. It is clear that the bulk of the money allocated "for the Ukrainian direction" when he was in charge of it from the Kremlin was stolen not so much by him, as by his Armenian "big friends. But now they have decided to make the "hopeful" separatist puppet a kind of "scapegoat".

Other separatist leaders in Sukhumi and Tskhinvali will have to worry too. Representatives of the "ancient people" do not like to take responsibility for their frauds but always find those to blame out of their hapless puppets. So, after stealing Russian "aid" for years the separatists in Sukhumi and Tskhinvali should not be held responsible not only for what they stole personally but also for what their "handlers" appropriated.

Kavkazplus