Four years into Russia’s invasion, life in the roughly 20% of Ukraine now under Russian military control is defined by housing shortages, crumbling infrastructure, systematic detention, and forced cultural integration into Russian society, according to escapees and human rights organizations. Residents of the occupied territories are required to adopt Russian citizenship to receive vital services, subjected to widespread arrest, and—in documented cases—tortured, while Moscow encourages its own citizens to relocate with financial incentives.
The conditions facing an estimated 3 million to 5 million Ukrainians in territories annexed by Russia or under military occupation represent one of the war’s most pressing humanitarian crises, with first-hand accounts and international monitoring bodies providing rare documentation of a region largely sealed off from independent observers.
Housing, Infrastructure, and Forced Assimilation
Four years after Russian forces seized roughly 20% of Ukraine, life in the occupied territories is marked by severe housing shortages, crumbling infrastructure, forced adoption of Russian citizenship, and systematic erasure of Ukrainian culture.
In the four annexed regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, Russian citizenship, language, and culture are being imposed on residents through school lessons and textbooks. By spring 2025, approximately 3.5 million people in these four regions had been issued Russian passports—a prerequisite to receive vital services including healthcare.
The port city of Mariupol, seized in May 2022 after a devastating siege that included Russian bombing of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater, which killed close to 600 people in a single attack, is being substantially rebuilt. Yet the new apartment blocks rising from the ruins are not sold to residents who lost their homes. Instead, they are marketed to Russian newcomers as Moscow encourages its citizens to relocate to the occupied regions with financial incentives. Teachers, doctors, and cultural workers are offered salary supplements if they commit to five years in the territories.
At least 12,191 apartments in Mariupol were added to a list of purportedly “ownerless” and abandoned units for expropriation in the first half of 2025, with thousands more seized elsewhere. Mariupol’s population has shrunk to roughly half its pre-war size of 500,000.
Infrastructure across occupied cities remains crippled. In Sievierodonetsk, which fell to Russian forces in June 2022, the population has dropped from 140,000 to 45,000, and only one ambulance crew serves the entire city. In Alchevsk in the Luhansk region, over half the homes have gone without heat for two months, with utility companies reporting that more than 60% of municipal heating networks are in poor condition. In the Donetsk region, water trucks fill barrels outside apartment blocks, but the water freezes solid in winter—and residents miss the trucks’ deliveries while at work.
Systematic Detention and Torture
Human rights organizations say Russian authorities have built a vast apparatus of detention and suppression in the occupied territories. According to documentation by the Center for Civil Liberties, Russian forces conduct “systemic and total control” through document checks, mass searches, denunciations, and what human rights groups describe as “filtration camps” designed to identify potentially disloyal individuals.
The target categories include government workers, military-connected individuals, journalists, teachers, scientists, and politicians—anyone perceived as potentially loyal to Ukraine rather than to Russia.
Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets reported that approximately 16,000 civilians have been detained illegally in the occupied territories, though that figure could be substantially higher because many are held incommunicado.
A United Nations report covering the period from July 2024 through June 2025 documented the accounts of 57 civilians detained in the occupied regions. Of those, 52 told investigators of severe beatings, electric shocks, sexual violence, degradation, and threats of violence. Russian officials have declined to comment on the allegations.
The case of Victoria Roshchyna exemplifies the human cost of dissent. Roshchyna, a 27-year-old Ukrainian journalist, disappeared in 2023 while reporting near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. Her body was handed over to Ukraine in 2025 bearing signs of torture and with some organs removed, according to prosecutors.
Voices from the Occupied Territories
Inna Vnukova, now living safely in Estonia, describes the moment she knew she had to flee. Hiding in a damp basement after Russia’s February 2022 invasion, she watched soldiers “waving machine guns” loot homes and set up checkpoints. “Everyone was very scared and afraid to go outside,” she said. She and her 16-year-old son escaped in mid-March, fleeing the village of Kudriashivka by car to Starobilsk, waving a white sheet amid mortar fire.
“We had already said our goodbyes to life, cursing this Russian world,” she recalled. “I’ve been trying to forget this nightmare for four years, but I can’t.”
Her husband, Oleksii Vnukov, a court security officer, stayed behind for nearly two weeks. Russian soldiers twice threatened to kill him and dragged him off the street at one point. He eventually escaped as well and, like his wife, now works in Estonia—she in a printing house, he as an electrician. The couple now has a 1-year-old daughter, Alisa.
“All life is leaving the occupied territories,” Oleksii said. “The people there aren’t living, they’re just surviving.”
Stanislav Shkuta, 25, lived in occupied Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson region until 2023. He narrowly escaped arrest several times. On one occasion, Russian soldiers stopped the bus he was riding and ordered passengers to remove clothing to search for Ukrainian tattoos.
“It was horrific. Men and women were asked to strip to the waist to see if they had Ukrainian tattoos,” Shkuta said. “I turned white with fear, wondering if I’d cleared everything on my phone.”
He has since reached Estonian safety, but says his friends who remain in Nova Kakhovka report that conditions have worsened. “Today, my friends complain that life there has become impossible,” he said.
Mykhailo Savva of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine said that while significant numbers of politically active residents have been detained, Russian special services continue aggressive surveillance. “Even though a significant number of socially active people have already been detained, Russian special services continue to identify disloyal Ukrainians, extract confessions, and continue to detain people,” Savva said. “Residents face such practices as document checks, mass searches, and denunciations on a daily basis.”
Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Center for Civil Liberties, described the system bluntly: “Everyone knows that if you end up in the basement, your life is worth nothing.”
She described Russian strategy in the territories as deliberate. “Russia uses terror in the occupied territories to physically eliminate active people working in certain fields: teachers, children’s writers, musicians, mayors, journalists, environmentalists. It also intimidates the passive majority.”
The erasure of Ukrainian culture extends to textbooks, street names, phone networks, and time zones. A former actor from Mariupol, who asked to remain anonymous to protect his elderly parents still living there, said his parents took Russian citizenship because they needed medical care and to receive a one-time payment of approximately $1,300 in compensation for their destroyed home.
“Only those who have Russian passports can survive,” he said. He noted that his parents have asked him not to send postcards written in Ukrainian because “it could be dangerous.”
On the suppression of Ukrainian culture, Matviichuk said: “Putin openly states that there is no Ukrainian language, no Ukrainian culture, no Ukrainian nation. And in the occupied territories, these words are turning into terrible practice.”
Rebuilding Without Relief
President Vladimir Putin, in marking the third anniversary of Russia’s incorporation of the four regions, acknowledged that residents face significant hardship. “I know how difficult it is now for the residents of the liberated cities and towns. There are many truly pressing, urgent problems,” he said, citing the need for reliable water supplies and access to healthcare.
Putin said he has launched a “large-scale socioeconomic development program” for the regions. The pledge has not yet translated into the return of basic services to many communities.
Inna Vnukova, having built a new life in Estonia with her family over four years, expressed the sentiment shared by many who fled: “We’ve been dreaming of returning for four years, but we increasingly wonder — what will we see there?”