Candidates are selected from among the students of the Kremlin's "School of Governors" and graduates of the "Leaders of Russia" competition who appeared as the curator of the occupied territories, Sergei Kiriyenko.
Photo: Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, DPR Prime Minister Vitaly Khotsenko and DPR Head Denis Pushilin at SPIEF. June 2022
Donat Sorokin / TASS
Since the beginning of the summer of 2022, officials from Russia have been massively occupying leadership positions in the "LPR", "DPR" and fake "military-civilian administrations" in the occupied territories of Ukraine. For some, this has turned into a social lift.
This is discussed in the investigation of the Russian media Meduza.
According to Meduza's calculations, most Russian officials "got a job" in the "DPR". In the so-called government, 6 out of 24 members are newcomers.
For example:
- the former head of the department of the Russian Ministry of Industry, Vitaly Khotsenko, became the head of the fake "cabinet of ministers";
- former assistant to the Russian minister of construction and housing and communal services, Yevgeny Solntsev became deputy head of the "government";
- Olga Koludarova, who worked in the Russian Ministry of Education and Administration of Udmurtia, became the "Minister of Education".
There are fewer immigrants from Russia in the "LPR". For example:
- Vasily Kuznetsov, the former vice-governor for politics of the Kurgan region, became deputy head of the "cabinet" headed by local official Sergei Kozlov;
- Former vice-rector of Sevastopol University Ivan Kusov, who previously taught at Moscow State University, became the Minister of Education.
Less significant posts were given, for example, to the head of the Omsk executive committee of United Russia Ilya Bubnov ("deputy minister of sports" in the "DPR"), the former political vice-governor of the Ulyanovsk and Lipetsk regions Alexander Kostomarov (became "deputy head of the apparatus" of the government of the "DPR").
Recently, there are more and more such officials. For example, on August 18, the fake "head of the DPR government" Khotsenko, appointed 5 Russian officials at once to various posts. According to him, this is necessary since the "DPR" allegedly "is moving towards rapprochement with Russia."
In the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Kharkiv regions of Ukraine, "administrations" are also partly formed by Russian officials. The "premiers" were the Vologda vice-governor Anton Koltsov (Zaporizhzhia region), the Kaliningrad vice-premier Sergey Eliseev (Kherson region), the former mayor of Krasnodar Andrey Alekseenko (Kharkiv region).
According to two Meduza sources, the future heads of fake governments are selected by the political bloc of the Putin administration. For an "easier" positions - through the plenipotentiary representation.
Candidates are selected from among the students of the Kremlin's "School of Governors" and graduates of the "Leaders of Russia" contest, who appeared on the initiative of the first deputy head of the presidential administration, Sergei Kiriyenko, who is called the Kremlin's curator of the occupied territories.
Those who refuse the Kremlin's offer are allegedly threatened with a decrease in the chances of further career growth in Russia. Those who agree are mostly officials who expect to quickly move up the Russian vertical of power in the future.
They also motivate officials with money - salaries are 2-3 times higher than in the Russian Federation. For example, for a middle-level official at the level of a regional minister, payments can be in the region of 500 thousand rubles.
"Some precious specialists can be offered a salary of more than a million," says the source.
For some officials, work in the occupied territories is a temporary business trip. Their task is to "keep an eye" on local officials working at the municipal level. For example, St. Petersburg took "patronage" over Mariupol, therefore St. Petersburg officials are sent to the region for a while. They pay twice their regular salary for this.
Sources say that the Russians will continue to send officials to the occupied territories. There are two reasons for this - the Russian Federation does not trust money to local officials, and the Ukrainians do not want to cooperate with the occupation authorities.
In the event of a fake referendum on the annexation of the occupied territories to Russia, they plan to "remove" many local officials, including the leaders of the "LPR" and "DPR" Leonid Pasechnik and Denis Pushilin.
