A long nightmare of repression awaits Ukraine’s occupied lands

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A few weeks ago, Russian authorities returned to Ukraine the body of Yevhen Matveyev, mayor of Dniprorudne, a Russian-occupied town. He was captured after President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Russians offered no explanation of Matveyev’s death. In September, Viktoria Roshchyna, a Ukrainian journalist who bravely reported on conditions in Russian-held areas, died in captivity. She was 27.

The longer Putin’s war of aggression has gone on, the less often such stories make the headlines. We hear a lot about Russian military advances in eastern Ukraine, less about what is happening to people in the occupied areas. But if, as seems possible, Ukraine agrees to a ceasefire next year on the west’s advice, it is as certain as night follows day that ruthless repression and Russification will continue in the roughly 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory expected to remain in Russian hands.

A growing war weariness in Ukraine and the desire of some western governments to end the fighting may enable Putin to retain de facto, though not legal, control of his conquests. But if so, the west will need a strong stomach for what will come next. To judge from Russia’s actions over the past three years — and longer in the case of Crimea, annexed in 2014 — the occupied areas will suffer a fate like that of western Ukraine and the Baltic states, seized by Joseph Stalin in the second world war and incorporated into the USSR.

Accurate information about occupied Ukraine right now is difficult but not impossible to come by. One authoritative source is the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. In October, Mariana Katzarova, the office’s special rapporteur for Russia, said: “Hundreds of Ukrainian detainees, including civilians and prisoners of war, are being forcibly transferred within Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine or deported to the Russian Federation, where they are held incommunicado and tortured for information or as punishment.”

There are credible reports of war crimes and human rights violations from Ukrainian non-governmental organisations and investigative media. Very occasionally, grim news emerges from Russia itself. In November, a military court in Rostov-on-Don sentenced two Russian soldiers to life in prison for killing a Ukrainian family of nine, including two children, in the occupied town of Volnovakha. The soldiers’ motives fell into the category of “political, ideological, racial, national or religious hatred”.

Another well-documented crime is the forcible abduction to Russia of Ukrainian children. Putin signed a decree putting these children on a fast track to Russian citizenship. The abductions prompted the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for him and for Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s misleadingly named commissioner for children’s rights. According to the Ukrainian website Children of War, almost 20,000 children have been deported or forcibly displaced.

The state-sanctioned removal of children points to a central aim of Russian policy in the occupied areas — the systematic eradication of Ukrainian identity. One route to this goal is to seize people’s homes and make it impossible for them to regain them unless they acquire Russian passports. Another is to declare homes ownerless and move Russian settlers into them. A third is to Russify the education system and use Roskomnadzor, Russia’s internet censor, to block independent Ukrainian websites.

Few occupied areas have been more rigorously Russified than Crimea. And of the people there, few have been treated more mercilessly than the Crimean Tatar minority. Some 250,000 lived in Crimea at the start of the century, but about 20,000 left the peninsula for mainland Ukraine after the 2014 annexation. Another 10,000 went abroad after the 2022 invasion to avoid conscription into Russia’s armed forces. In a newly published book about the Crimean Tatars, the British scholar Donald Rayfield describes Russia’s actions since 2014 as “the last stage of an ethnic genocide”.

It is the last stage because, in 1944, Stalin deported the entire Crimean Tatar population from its homeland (many returned in the 1980s and 1990s). Tens of thousands died en route to central Asia and Siberia. Similar horrors were inflicted on Poles, Balts and other minorities.

Memories of these crimes explain why many central and eastern Europeans, including Ukrainians, abhor the idea of leaving Putin in control of areas seized since 2022. They know what Russia has done in the past, what it is doing now and what it will do in the future. A ceasefire seems on the horizon — but if it happens, the aftermath will rest on our consciences for much longer.

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