Three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukrainians living under occupation are holding onto their identities and continuing to hope for liberation from their imperialist oppressors.
“They held me for two and a half days, forced me to take a polygraph and asked about weapons, drugs, whether the territory was ‘occupied’ or ‘liberated,’ how I felt about their ‘special operation’ and the Azov Battalion,” said Olena, from Henichesk, a port city in the Kherson region, recalling a 2023 attempt to reach her 5-year-old son. “The whole time, I had no food or water and slept on a metal chair.”
She was separated from her son after the full-scale invasion and intense fighting meant she was unable to join her parents, who were looking after him. After a week in Kyiv, she moved as a refugee to Warsaw, Poland, from where she traveled to the Latvian-Russian border to find a route to her son, but was denied entry.
Russian border guards accused her of wanting to spy on Russian military facilities during her journey to occupied Ukraine. The next day, she tried another border crossing, but again they wouldn’t let her through. “They said ‘do you want us to put you in prison?’ I just left and returned to Poland,” she said.
Later, Olena applied for power of attorney for her mother so she could bring her son out. Her mother had to get permission from the occupying administration and travel for three days to Europe. On her way back from Poland to occupied Kherson, she spent seven days at the border due to filtration. “She never told me what they asked her. She was scared,” Olena said.
Olena’s story is typical of millions of Ukrainians from the occupied territories who struggle every day, whether they chose to stay or leave. Three years after the full-scale invasion, and 11 since the annexation of Crimea, and occupation of Luhansk and Donetsk, six million Ukrainians, including 1.5 million children, still live in areas controlled by Russia, according to the government in Kyiv.
If they stay, they have to go through a process of Russification, under which they are forced to obtain Russian passports to access medical services, register property, drive vehicles, and many other requirements of daily life.
They are also in danger of being detained for allegedly spying for Kyiv or referring to the “special military operation” as a war. The Russian occupiers are holding more than 20,000 civilian hostages in detention facilities, the Ukrainian government says, citing appeals it has received from relatives.
And this is likely to be the tip of the iceberg, as those under occupation are wary of reaching out to the Ukrainian authorities because the Russians might accuse them of espionage.
Having jailed so many of the local population or forced them to flee, the Russians are using well-worn colonial tactics to try to forcibly change the ethnic composition of the occupied territories. Their actions evoke strong echoes of the Soviet history of Ukraine, when Russians were relocated to Donbas and Crimea and the indigenous population deported.
“This is a war crime, both as a crime of annexation and a crime of forced movement of people,” said Kostyantyn Batozsky, founder of Ukraine’s Azov Development Agency. “The fact people were forced to leave the occupied territories because they are Ukrainian, or because Russia completely destroyed their lives, is a crime.”
Realizing the local population doesn’t welcome their presence, the Russians have offered incentives to attract professionals in shortage occupations, including teachers, doctors, civil servants and FSB agents, through cheap mortgages or bigger salaries.
“Russians continue to move in, with mortgages and jobs set aside for them. Unfortunately, they will keep coming,” said Petro Andriushchenko, advisor to the exiled Ukrainian mayor of Mariupol. “They’ve already approved at least 70 apartment buildings with mortgages for Russians. That’s thousands of people.”
About 80,000 Ukrainians and 80,000 Russians now live in Mariupol, according to Andriushchenko. And, despite some reports, the arrivals aren’t migrants from Central Asia, but people from Moscow and St. Petersburg seeking cheap mortgages and properties, he said. Around one million Russians have moved to Crimea, meaning more than 35% of the population has been replaced during 11 years of occupation.
Mariupol is a strategic military hub for the Russians, so they have invested there, but they are less interested in other occupied territories where local economies are struggling, Batozsky said. Only 15 mines out of 114 are operating in Donetsk, for example, and its metallurgy and coal industries have been wiped out, he said.
In Melitopol, all industries are shut down, leaving only military jobs, while Crimea’s tourism industry has collapsed. For many, joining the Russian army is the only option to earn money.
“For the past 10 years, the Donbas economy has been systematically destroyed. The only thriving city in the region was Mariupol, which continued its metal production until 2022,” Batozsky said. “Other parts of Donbas, like Pokrovsk, which relied on coal, have been completely ruined.”
Some relocated Russians are using the occupied territories as a springboard for their careers, but they have no intention of staying. Hundreds of local collaborators who have worked for the occupying administrations are also being replaced by Russians.
“People arrive in higher positions, but they quickly realize they’re not in a new, welcoming region of Russia, but in an occupied territory,” said Yurii Sobolevskii, first deputy head of Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast Council. “Despite the region being included in the [Russian] constitution, the situation is uncertain, and they don’t see themselves staying for long.”
Moscow has invested heavily in indoctrinating young people and militarizing education, as part of its attempt to erase the Ukrainian identity and turn Ukrainian children into Russians.
“Parents are intimidated, and even fear helping their children, because teachers — often collaborating with the enemy or brought in from Russia — seek to identify disloyal families,” Sobolevskii said. “They ask children about their parents’ views on Russia, Putin, the Russian army, and whether they believe Kherson is part of Russia.”
Despite the colonial practices used by the Russians, there is evidence many young people are unswayed. There are 44,000 children from the occupied territories still studying remotely in Ukrainian schools and a growing number are choosing to study at Ukrainian universities after going through filtration procedures.
“The total number of applicants from the occupied territories in 2024 was 11,900, compared to 6,463 a year earlier,” said Mariia Sulialina, head of Almenda, a Ukrainian human rights organization. “I feel immense respect for the children who consciously choose to study in Ukraine, a country facing daily bombardments and attacks.”
Dr. Oleksandr Shulga, who leads the Institute for Conflict Studies and Analysis of Russia and monitors sociological trends in Russia, says population replacement and eliminating disloyal communities will remain a priority as long as the occupiers remain. And the indoctrination of children, a war crime, will be especially aggressive.
He suggests creating a registry to track Russians in the occupied territories, particularly those involved in such crimes. “Researchers can quickly identify them, but the data must be legally binding,” he said. “The global community must ensure these occupiers never return, as their return would be a ticking time bomb, as seen in Donbas.”
Elina Beketova is a Democracy Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), focusing on the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. She worked as a journalist, editor, and TV anchor for various news stations in Kharkiv and Kyiv.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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