Life is harsh in Russian-run parts of Ukraine

Even now, safe in her new home in Estonia, Inna Vnukova says she can’t shake the horrific memory of living under Russian occupation in eastern Ukraine in the early war and her family’s harrowing escape.

They hid in a damp basement in their village, Kudriashivka, for days following Russia’s large-scale invasion in February 2022.

Soldiers waving machine guns through the streets bullied residents, set up checkpoints and looted homes. There was constant bombardment.

“Everyone was too scared and scared to go out,” Vnukova told The Associated Press as soldiers searched for Ukrainian sympathizers and officers like her and her husband, Oleksii Vnukov.

In mid-March, she and her 16-year-old son Zhenya decided to flee the village with her brother’s family, even though it meant temporarily leaving her husband behind.

They made the risky journey by car to nearby Starobilsk, waving a white sheet amid mortar fire.

42-year-old Vnukova said, “We had already said goodbye to this Russian world by cursing it.”

“I’ve been trying to forget this nightmare for four years, but I can’t.”

Like Vnukova, many Ukrainians fled the occupying forces.

Those left behind risked detention—or worse—as Russian forces eventually gained control of nearly 20 percent of the country and an estimated three to five million people.

After four years of war, life remains difficult in devastated cities like Mariupol and villages like Kudriashivka; Residents face problems with housing, water, electricity, heating and healthcare.

Even President Vladimir Putin acknowledged that they have “a lot of really urgent, urgent problems.”

In the illegally annexed regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia, Russian citizenship, language and culture, including school lessons and textbooks, are imposed on residents.

By spring 2025 in the northern hemisphere, approximately 3.5 million people in four regions had been issued Russian passports, a requirement for them to receive vital services such as healthcare.

Some people in the region say they fear being accused of sympathizing with Ukraine.

According to human rights activists, many people were imprisoned, beaten and killed.

Court security guard Oleksii Vnukov remained in the village for about two weeks.

Russian soldiers threatened to kill him twice, including when he and a friend were dragged off the street by soldiers.

But he survived and soon escaped from the village as well.

The family traveled around Russia before heading to Estonia, where Inna worked in a printing house and Oleksii, 43, was an electrician.

“All life is leaving the occupied territories,” Vnukov said.

“The people who live there aren’t living, they’re just surviving.”

Mykhailo Savva from the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine said that the Russian army’s practice of exercising “systemic and complete control” in the regions continues today.

“Although a large number of socially active people have already been detained, Russian special services continue to identify disloyal Ukrainians, extract confessions and detain people,” Savva said.

“Citizens are faced with practices such as document checks, mass searches and denunciations every day.”

Human rights groups say Russian authorities use “filtration camps” to identify potential disloyal people, as well as people who work for the government, aid the Ukrainian military or have relatives in the military, as well as journalists, teachers, scientists and politicians.

Stanislav Shkuta, a 25-year-old resident of occupied Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson region, said he narrowly avoided arrest several times before reaching the Ukrainian-controlled territory in 2023.

He remembered being on a bus that was stopped by Russian soldiers.

“It was terrible. Men and women were asked to undress to the waist to see if they had Ukrainian tattoos,” said Shkuta, who now lives in Estonia.

“I turned white with fear, wondering if I had cleared everything off my phone.”

He said friends staying in Nova Kakhovka told him that life had become worse due to suspected Ukrainian sympathizers being stopped on the street or surprise door-to-door checks.

“Today my friends complain that life there has become impossible,” he said.

Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Center for Civil Liberties, said Russia had established “a vast network of secret and official detention centers where tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians are held indefinitely.”

“Everyone knows that if you fall into the basement, your life is worth nothing,” he said.

Russian officials have refused to comment on past allegations by UN human rights officials that they tortured civilians and prisoners of war.

Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said about 16,000 civilians were illegally detained, but that number could be much higher because many were kept incommunicado.

The UN report published last summer stated that 57 civilians detained in occupied areas between July 2024 and June 2025 were interviewed, and 52 of them spoke of severe beatings, electric shocks, sexual violence, humiliation and threats of violence.

One particularly famous case is that of 27-year-old Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna, who disappeared while reporting near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in 2023 and died in Russian custody.

The prosecutor said that when his body was delivered to Ukraine in 2025, it bore signs of torture and some of his organs were removed.

“Russia uses terrorism to physically eliminate active people working in certain areas in the occupied territories: teachers, children’s writers, musicians, mayors, journalists and environmentalists. This also intimidates the passive majority,” says Matviichuk.

Meanwhile, Inna Vnukova is building a new life in Estonia. She and Oleksii now have a one-year-old daughter named Alisa. Their son is now 20 years old.

Vnukova said that only 150 people, including the couple’s parents, remained in the village where 800 people once lived, adding that one day she wanted to show her daughter the family’s hometown, the Luhansk region.

“We’ve been dreaming of returning for four years, but more and more we wonder: What will we see there?” he asked.