How Putin rules in occupied Ukraine

Pic: Wikimedia. French translation of this article here.

With Russia-Ukraine peace talks crawling slowly onwards with little outcome, and much discussion in the press of territories changing hands, almost no attention is being paid to the situation in the occupied territories of Eastern Ukraine. Due to tight censorship and harsh prosecutions, there are very few reports coming from inside the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, or from the longer-annexed Crimean peninsula.

The Russian government plans to turn large swathes of occupied Ukraine into a military production complex. In April 2025 the entire industrial sector of the city of Melitopol, Zaporizhzhia Oblast, was repurposed into one enormous military production plant. In some ways, this mirrors the repurposing of much of the infrastructure within Russia itself towards military goods, but the scale and speed of the shift is more drastic, creating centres for arms and vehicle production much nearer to the frontline.

In parallel with this large industrial transformation is a demographic one. Russia has heavily incentivised its own citizens to move to the occupied territories, though exact numbers are impossible to identify. In part, this is to populate the factory towns and cities with a new workforce. It also serves to “homogenise” Eastern Ukraine by force – it is easier to enforce laws about speaking Russian when a significant portion of the new population have only ever spoken Russian anyway, and easier to punish those who identify as Ukrainian when they have been surrounded by Russians.

In and of itself, this is a difficult experience for many of the regions’ original inhabitants. The problem is compounded by enforced Russification on a mass scale. Simon Pirani has previously reported on Ukrainians being forced to accept Russian passports in order to access such basic things as central heating, healthcare or voting rights. Unsurprisingly, this has led to a large uptake in Russian passports – the Russian government claims 95% of the occupied territories are now citizens of the Russian Federation, a process which involves recording a video declaring that you support Russia’s war effort and its government. In effect, this is mass-scale production of kompromat, some of which has already been circulated on Russian state TV and the internet.

Despite apparent Russian successes, a new law was introduced this year requiring a Russian passport in order to buy bus tickets, suggesting there are people resistant enough to require further threats.

While Russians are encouraged to move to Ukraine, the reverse does not apply. Despite being legally citizens of the Russian Federation, Ukrainians with a Russian passport who try to travel into Russia are often subjected to “filtration” procedures in Russian airports, and made to wait in cramped and unhygienic conditions for hours, even days, before being allowed to travel (or not). 2024 saw at least four recorded deaths of people awaiting filtration decisions in Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow.

The arriving Russians in the occupied regions need homes to live in. The Eastern Human Rights Group (EHRG) reports that the state is offering up homes that have been designated "abandoned". By July 2024, over one million homes had been reclaimed by the state, largely to be redistributed to Russian “settlers”.

Stories abound of Ukrainians travelling to another part of the country or overseas for as little as a month, only to return to another family living in their apartment. The process has disturbing similarities with the treatment of Palestinian families and their homes in the West Bank.

The corruption that riddles Russian bureaucracy (as well, admittedly, as its equivalent in Ukraine) is in full force here, too: families will be arbitrarily told that their dwelling legally has “no owner”, forcing them to bribe local government officials in order to continue living in their own home.

Vera Yastrebova, spokesperson for the Eastern Human Rights Group, in a video explaining the seizure of Ukrainian homes, said: ““Here is your real ‘Russian World’ for you: they came with machine guns, covered your towns in blood, destroyed your homes, and now, like marauders, divide up other people’s property between themselves. Ukrainian apartments are being given over en masse to Russian raiders, as trophies.”

The treatment of children in the occupied territories is slowly gaining some of the press attention it deserves. Numbers are extremely hard to pin down, but at the very least, tens of thousands of Ukrainian children (possibly hundreds of thousands) have been taken from Eastern Ukraine into the Russian care system, often via secretive "re-education camps" to try and initiate them into life as a Russian. Much like political prisoners and prisoners of war, once in the Russian care system, Ukrainian children are systematically moved away from Ukraine itself, to care services in far-flung corners of the Russian Federation. Parents who refuse to give their children Russian passports can lose custody of them, and many prominent Russian politicians and public figures have now made a show of adopting "rescued" Ukrainian children, almost as a fashion statement.

School curricula in the occupied areas have been completely rewritten. Teaching in Ukrainian is strictly forbidden, and teachers either speaking in Ukrainian or allowing their students to do so can be severely punished. All history and culture taught in schools is now Russian history and Russian culture.

Ukrainians are imprisoned in the occupied territories for any number of charges and at an extremely high rate. Once moved to Russian prisons, they are then treated as a lower caste, subject to beatings, abuse and torture from prisoners and guards alike. This is perhaps even more the case for ethnic and religious minorities from the region, most prominently Crimean Tatars. That group has faced systematic persecution since the 2014 annexation, with around 150 political and community figures currently classified as political prisoners.

The risk posed by a careless attitude to reconstruction and environmental safety should not be underestimated. Russia has deliberately removed much of the equipment monitoring the condition of flooded coal mines in the Donbas, to avoid scrutiny from the international scientific community, as well as avoiding taking urgent action to contain various polluting substances and toxins that leech from the uncontained mines into the surrounding earth. With the information available, one recent report estimated that if serious action was not taken within five to twelve years, two thirds of the Donbas could become uninhabitable.

Russia has boasted of Mariupol as a revitalised city, with repaired buildings and almost all of the population returned. Reports on the ground differ, describing the renovations that have taken place as superficial, with many buildings and services in the city still not available or functioning, and far fewer people living in Mariupol than the government claims. Most importantly, the two large steel factories that were the city’s lifeblood have not been rebuilt in the slightest.

Zelensky’s government is a corrupt, Thatcherite force, guilty of attacks on the labour movement and courting foreign capital at the expense of Ukraine’s working class. But to claim that it is in any way equivalent with the puppet statelets imposed upon the people of Donbas, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Crimea is sorely wrong. For the people of Eastern Ukraine to survive the war and the hard years following it, they will need to build working-class forces and social movements that are currently being systematically and brutally strangled by an invading force. Any discussion of peace negotiations will have to acknowledge that fact.