Life is harsh and dangerous in Russian-run parts of Ukraine, activists and former residents say

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Even now, safe in her new home of 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 for days in a damp basement in their village, Kudriashivka. Large-scale invasion of Russia 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.

“We said goodbye to this Russian world by cursing it,” said 42-year-old Vnukova. “I’ve been trying to forget this nightmare for four years, but I can’t.”

Like Vnukova, many Ukrainians fled the occupying forces. As Russian forces eventually gained control of nearly 20% of the country and an estimated 3 to 5 million people, those left behind risked detention or worse.

A new Russian life in the captured regions

Life after four years of war Shattered cities like Mariupol and Kudriashivka, residents face problems with housing, water, electricity, heating and healthcare. Even President Vladimir Putin acknowledged that they have “a lot of really pressing and urgent problems.”

In the illegally annexed regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia, Russian citizenship, Language and culture are imposed on residents, including through school lessons and textbooks. As of spring 2025, nearly 3.5 million people in four regions have 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 are not living, they are 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.

Russia has established a “wide network” secret and official detention centers where “tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians are being held indefinitely without charge,” said Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Center for Civil Liberties.

“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.

Approximately 16,000 civilians have been illegally detained, but this number may be much higher because many are being held incommunicado. said Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets.

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, environmentalists. At the same time, it intimidates the passive majority,” says Matviichuk.

Destruction in Mariupol

At the beginning of the war, Russian forces besiege Mariupol Before the port city falls in May 2022. Donetsk Academic District Drama Theater According to AP’s research, nearly 600 people were killed in and around the building on March 16 of the same year, and this was the deadliest known attack against civilians in the war.

A former actor who lived with his parents for months said most of the city’s population of about half a million had fled, but many were hiding in basements and were nearly killed in Russian bombing.

The former actor, who is now in Estonia, spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid endangering his 76-year-old parents, who are still in Mariupol. He said they would have to obtain Russian citizenship to receive medical care and make a one-time payment equivalent to $1,300 per person as compensation for their destroyed homes.

Russification is taking place in Mariupol, as in other occupied cities; street names are being changed, Moscow-approved curricula are taught in schools, Russian telephone and TV networks are used, and the city is placed in Moscow’s time zone.

“But even today the threat of death has not disappeared. Only those with a Russian passport can survive,” said the former actor, adding that his parents asked him not to send postcards in Ukrainian because “it could be dangerous.”

Putin “clearly states that there is no Ukrainian language, no Ukrainian culture, no Ukrainian nation. And in the occupied territories, these words turn into a terrible practice,” Matviichuk said.

However, not everyone opposes Russia’s capture of Mariupol. The former actor said half of the members of his former group now support the Kremlin and believe Kiev is “inciting war.”

Housing is a sore point in Mariupol, where the population is about half what it was before 2022. New apartment blocks are rising from the ruins, but instead of going to those who lost their homes, they are sold to newly arrived Russians.

Some of those who lost their homes made a video call to Putin. “You said, ‘We won’t give up ours.’ Aren’t we considered yours?” said one resident at a mass rally.

At least 12,191 flats in Mariupol have been added to the list of “derelict” and abandoned flats that will allegedly be expropriated in the first half of 2025. Thousands more are being confiscated elsewhere.

Moscow encourages Russian citizens to move to occupied territories, offering several benefits. Teachers, doctors and cultural workers are promised salary supplements if they commit to living there for five years.

Crumbling infrastructure and doctor shortage

Years of war and neglect have left many occupied cities in eastern Ukraine facing serious problems with heat, electricity and water supply.

The northeastern city of Sievierodonetsk suffered significant destruction before falling to Russian hands in June 2022. In the city where 140,000 people once lived, only 45,000 people remain, most of whom are elderly or disabled.

Only one ambulance team serves the entire city, and doctors and other medical workers from Russian regions such as Perm rotate to work at the hospital, said a 67-year-old former engineer who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

But because he was born and raised in the former Soviet Union, he still supports “the great job Putin is doing.”

In Alchevsk, a city in the Luhansk region, more than half of the houses have been unheated for two extremely cold months. Five heating stations have been installed, and utility companies said more than 60 percent of municipal heating networks were in poor condition and there were no funds for repairs.

Even Oleg Tsaryov, a pro-Moscow politician, accused the authorities of freezing “the entire city”. When the heating system failed in 2006, he noted on social media that Ukrainian officials “and the entire country stepped in to help and completely replaced the faulty equipment.” But after Russia took over, authorities “managed to repeat this Armageddon scenario again,” he added.

In the Donetsk region, water trucks fill barrels outside apartment blocks – but they freeze to death in winter, one resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he feared possible repercussions.

“There are constant fights over water,” he said, adding that queues to get the precious resource were “insane” and people away from work often missed the arrival of trucks.

Residents of Donetsk have written a call to Putin to intervene in what has become a “humanitarian and environmental disaster”.

Putin acknowledged the situation in four regions last year.

Celebrating the third anniversary of the annexation of these regions to Russia, he said: “I know how difficult it is now for those living in the liberated cities and towns. There are many really urgent, urgent problems.” he said. He said he was launching a “large-scale socioeconomic development program” for the regions, citing the need for reliable water supplies and access to healthcare, among other issues.

Meanwhile, Inna Vnukova is building a new life in Estonia: She and Oleksii now have a 1-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 have been dreaming of returning for four years, but more and more we wonder: What will we see there?” he asked.

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Katie Marie Davies from Manchester, England, contributed.