For residents in the occupied territories of east Ukraine, checks by Russian officials are now a regular occurrence.
“They have checkpoints in and out of every major city, in and out of every village, on the road itself… There’s lots of them,” says Sofiia, who works for Helping to Leave, an organisation that evacuates Ukrainians from the occupied territories.
The checkpoints allow Russian soldiers to enforce new rules restricting who can enter and leave certain towns, and they also provide an opportunity to check residents’ papers.
“And if you do not have a Russian passport – only a Ukrainian one – you will be checked at each and every roadblock and you will be questioned a lot,” Sofiia adds. “Sometimes they will not let you through.”
The biggest check point of all is the Russian border crossing – now the only route in and out of the territory, which leads directly into Russia.
For Ukrainian nationals who want to travel to unoccupied Ukraine, this border point is the start of a long, one-way journey taking them through Russia and Belarus to a crossing, which is only accessible on foot, in north-west Ukraine.
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Those who leave can only take what they can carry – if they can get to the border at all. In rural areas, especially near the front lines, there are no buses and many roads have been destroyed by fighting.
Since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, Helping to Leave has assisted thousands of people to evacuate, “but we have cases where people are reaching out to us from villages where we basically cannot pick them up because it’s impossible to get there”, Sofiia says.
‘Passportisation’ completed
Those who can reach the border undergo a process called filtration “where they are questioned heavily” by Russian guards, Sofiia says. “Sometimes it takes hours. Sometimes, if you’re not lucky, it can be days. It’s not guaranteed that they will be let through.”
Border guards are especially likely to stop young Ukrainian young men, most of whom now have Russian passports, making them eligible for conscription in the Russian army.
“We can never guarantee that the Russian border guards won’t arrest them,” Sofiia says. “It’s a lottery.”
The Kremlin said last week it has issued 3.5 million passports for Ukrainian nationals in the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts – four regions it claimed to have annexed in 2022. According to President Vladimir Putin, Russia has now “virtually completed” the so-called ‘passportisation’ process in east Ukraine, which is a cornerstone of its authority in the territory.
Without Russian passports, Ukrainian nationals in occupied territories are considered “foreign citizens” and can no longer own property, receive pension payments or access health and social care.
Rights groups have reported coercive tactics by Russian officials such as ordering health care professionals to refuse treatment for Ukrainian nationals and setting up administration points for Russian passport applications inside healthcare facilities.
In the war-torn territory, Russia has also offered generous incentives for Ukrainians to accept passports such as stipends to move to mainland Russia – away from front-line fighting – humanitarian aid, and money for the parents of newborns with Russian birth certificates.
Families have been left with little choice except to naturalise their children, as only Russian citizens can attend school. “We know of cases where parents were threatened that their children would be taken by the child protection services because they were not attending the local Russian school,” Sofiia says.
The threat is not idle. Since the full-scale Russian invasion began in 2022, Ukraine estimates that at least 20,000 Ukrainian children have been taken from their families and forcibly transferred to Russia to be adopted by Russian families.
A ‘heavy push for indoctrination’
In Russian schools in occupied territories, children learn from a Russian curriculum skewed towards “a heavy push for indoctrination”, says Jaroslava Barbieri, a doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham, UK, and specialist in the Russian state’s attempts to de-sovereignise Ukraine.
The curriculum prioritises “replacing Ukrainian language, literature and history with Russian language, literature and history, and expunging any mention of Ukraine from Russian textbooks that get exported to the occupied territories”, she says.
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Some parents do organise for their children to continue attending Ukrainian school online as an extra-curricular activity, “but it’s not something people are open about”, says Sofiia. “Everything that is pro-Ukrainian is dangerous to talk about.”
Even speaking Ukrainian can lead to detention. According Ukraine’s ombudsperson, 16,000 Ukrainian civilians are being held unlawfully in occupied territories and mainland Russia.
Government documents indicate that Russia plans to expand the crackdown by creating 25 new prison colonies and six other detention centres in occupied Ukraine by 2026.
Olena*, a Ukrainian refugee living in Vienna, finds it difficult to keep in touch with her family who live in occupied Mariupol.
“It’s forbidden to speak Ukrainian or show that you have connections with people from Ukraine, even if it’s family,” she says. “On the street there are soldiers and they often check mobile phones. My brother is afraid to speak with me and he deletes my messages.”
Olena’s mother also deletes her messages as soon as she receives them, but she manages to call her daughter once a week using a VPN to disguise her location, without which the international calls don’t go through.
Her mother, who is retired, now spends most of her time trying to repair her home, which was bombed but not destroyed by fighting. Like many other Ukrainian nationals, she got a Russian passport in order to register her apartment with the Russian authorities. “Otherwise, they would take away her property and bring in new people,” says Olena, who suspects the new residents would have been Russians.
Under new laws, Russia has the right to seize “abandoned” private property in occupied territories, and it’s state banking system – which started opening branches in occupied Ukraine in 2024 – offers subsidised home loans for Russians who want to buy property there.
By March 2024, Russia had seized at least 1,785 homes and businesses in Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia – a practice that violates “the right of displaced persons to return to their homes” according to the UN’s human rights body (UNCHR).
The NGO Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union estimates that 800,000 Russians have moved in to Crimea since the Russian occupation began in 2014.
Irreversible integration
Russia’s overall aim in occupied Ukraine is to “coerce people living there to accept an irreversible integration into the Russian federal system and cultural-social world”, Barbieri says.
It has implemented similar strategies in Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk since 2014, and in Russian occupied Transnistria, in Moldova.
“The idea is to gradually alienate the local population from the rest of Ukrainian society, placing particular emphasis on children, by telling them that they were taken away from the real motherland, and portraying Ukraine as a hostile and artificial state entity that has consistently violated the rights of people in eastern Ukraine,” Barbieri adds.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said Ukraine will not recognise any occupied territories as part of Russia under a potential future peace agreement with Moscow.
But the more Russia lays down roots, the more the territory starts to look, sound and feel like part of mainland Russia, making any return of occupied territory to Ukraine that much more difficult. Former residents would have no property to return to, it would be complicated to differentiate between Russian collaborators and those who were coerced into coexistence, and a generation of children would have been educated in Russian – some of them since 2014.
“Reintegration is an exceptionally difficult and complicated process,” Barbieri says. “It’s not just about negotiating territories back and forth – it’s about people.”
For many Ukrainians though, the alternative is unthinkable.
If a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine redrew the map so that a city like Mariupol became part of Russia, Olena would be devastated. “It’s really scary,” she says, “It would mean for me that I will never see my mother and my brother again.”
* Olena’s name has been changed to protect her family’s identity.
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