Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine

• 1. Introduction

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  Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine cover parts of the country's south and east under Russian control since the Russo-Ukrainian War began. Ukrainian law gives these areas an official label: the temporarily occupied territories. Since the full-scale invasion, these territories have lost roughly half of their population. Somewhere between 3 and 3.5 million Ukrainians are still believed to live there. The United Nations Human Rights Office says people under occupation face severe abuses. How did Russia come to hold this ground? What happens to the people who remain there? Why do Kyiv and Moscow remain so far apart on ending it?

• 2. Origins of Occupation

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  The Euromaidan protests, underway since November 2013, ended with Ukraine's parliament dismissing president Viktor Yanukovych. He then fled to Russia. Growing pro-European sentiment in Kyiv unsettled the Kremlin. Russian president Vladimir Putin mobilized army and airborne units, and they invaded Crimea. Those forces quickly seized major government buildings and blockaded Ukrainian troops inside their own bases across the peninsula.

  Russian-installed officials in Crimea then organized a referendum on joining Russia. Western and independent organizations called the vote illegitimate. The Kremlin rejected those objections and annexed Crimea outright, prompting Western sanctions against Russia. At the same time, pro-Russian counter-protests broke out across eastern and southern Ukraine. Russia allegedly backed militant separatists who seized government buildings in the Donbas region. Those separatists went on to form the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, opening what became known as the war in Donbas.

  On the 15th of April 2014, Ukraine's parliament passed Law No. 1207-VII, defining Crimea as temporarily occupied territory. A Cabinet order dated the 7th of November 2014 listed settlements in Donetsk and Luhansk beyond government control. A further law, passed on the 17th of March 2015, named specific raions, cities, and villages in those regions as occupied territory as well.

  Petro Poroshenko, one of the opposition leaders from Euromaidan, won the ensuing election in a landslide. He took office three months after Yanukovych's removal, succeeding interim president Turchynov. The government he led would face a far larger invasion eight years later.

• 3. The Invasion Unfolds

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  On the 24th of February 2022, Russian troops crossed Ukraine's border and began a full-scale invasion. The advance pushed toward northern Ukraine, including the capital Kyiv, aiming to secure the north before turning east and south. The advance stalled amid fierce resistance and a Russian convoy that got stuck outside Kyiv. By early April, the Russian Armed Forces had withdrawn from all of northern Ukraine.

  Before the full-scale invasion, Russia already held about 42,000 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory across Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk. By March 2022, the invasion had added roughly 119,000 square kilometers more. That brought Russian-held ground to about 161,000 square kilometers, nearly 27 percent of the country.

  In September 2022, Ukrainian forces launched a counteroffensive around Kharkiv and reclaimed most of that oblast within weeks. By the 11th of November 2022, the Institute for the Study of War calculated that Ukrainian forces had reclaimed 74,443 square kilometers. That left Russia in control of about 18 percent of the country.

  On the 30th of September 2022, Russia announced it was annexing the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts. Russian forces controlled only part of the territory it claimed. The UN General Assembly passed a resolution rejecting the annexation as illegal and affirming Ukraine's territorial integrity. The front then began to move much more slowly. Russian forces gained a net 487 square kilometers over the whole of 2023. In 2024 they captured about 4,168 square kilometers more, concentrated mostly in September, October, and November. Those 2024 gains came partly in Russia's own Kursk Oblast, where Ukraine had launched a cross-border offensive of its own.

• 4. Key Battles and Sieges

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  Russian troops entered Ukraine's Henichesk and Skadovsk raions from Crimea, the opening move against Kherson Oblast. In the days that followed, Russian forces surrounded most cities and towns there, blocking their entrances with roadblocks rather than moving in. Heavy fighting broke out over the Antonivskyi Bridge, which crosses the Dnipro River between Russian positions on the south bank and Ukrainian-held Kherson city on the north. Ukraine's forces retreated under heavier Russian firepower, and Kherson fell to Russian control on the 2nd of March.

  On the 29th of June 2022, Russian occupation authorities in Kherson announced plans for an annexation referendum. Ukraine responded on the 9th of July by announcing preparations for a counteroffensive in the south. It urged residents of occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia to shelter or evacuate. Ukrainian forces then destroyed the Antonivskyi Bridge and pressed forward from the west. Cut off from supply lines and facing heavy shelling, Russian troops withdrew from the entire north bank of the Dnipro, including Kherson city.

  Further east, the city of Berdiansk came under Russian control on the 26th of February 2022. Melitopol followed on the 1st of March after fierce fighting. Russian troops also besieged and captured Enerhodar, home to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, on the 4th of March. Since July, missile strikes near the plant, blamed by each side on the other, have raised fears of a repeat of the Chernobyl disaster.

  In Donetsk Oblast, Russian forces and the Russian-backed Donetsk People's Republic built on territory already held since the war in Donbas. Their most significant gain was the port city of Mariupol, captured after a prolonged siege.

  In Kharkiv Oblast, Ukrainian forces pushed Russian troops back toward the border by mid-May 2022, despite Russian attempts to consolidate control. By the 11th of September, Russia had retreated from nearly all of the settlements it had occupied there. The Russian Ministry of Defense described the retreat as an operation to curtail and transfer troops, a euphemism for one of the war's largest reversals.

• 5. Life Under Occupation

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  The United Nations Human Rights Office describes arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, and torture carried out by Russian soldiers acting, in the UN's words, with impunity. Peaceful protests and freedom of speech have been suppressed, and freedom of movement is severely restricted. Anyone suspected of opposing the occupation has been targeted. Residents say they have been encouraged to inform on one another, "leaving them afraid even of their own friends and neighbours."

  OHCHR later concluded that Russia was guilty of enforced disappearances and torture as crimes against humanity, along with arbitrary arrest and detention. Human Rights Watch separately found Russia guilty of forcibly conscripting people under occupation to fight against their own country, as well as deportation and forced displacement.

  From July 2024, anyone living in the occupied territories without a Russian passport can be imprisoned as a "foreign citizen." Many Ukrainians have been coerced into taking that passport and Russian citizenship instead. Those who refuse are denied healthcare, freedom of movement, public sector jobs, and social security benefits. Ukrainian men who accept a Russian passport are then drafted to fight against Ukraine's own army.

  Schools in the occupied territories have been forced to adopt Russia's own curriculum, teaching from textbooks that justify the invasion. Children are enlisted into youth groups designed to instill Russian nationalism. Some parents who refuse Russian passports have had their children taken from them. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has recognized Russia's abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children as genocidal.

• 6. Erasing Ukrainian Culture

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  United Nations special rapporteurs have condemned Russian occupation authorities for trying to erase local Ukrainian culture, history, and language, replacing them with Russian equivalents. Monuments and places of worship have been razed. Ukrainian history books and literature judged "extremist" have been pulled from public libraries and destroyed. Civil servants and teachers who refuse to carry out Russian policy have been detained.

  The International Court of Justice ruled that Russia broke the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Its finding centered on Russia restricting Ukrainian-language school classes in occupied Crimea. Ukrainian language and media more broadly have been replaced by Russian language and media across the occupied territories.

  In Crimea specifically, Russia has been accused of neo-colonialism. Critics point to enforced Russification, passportization, and the settling of Russian citizens on the peninsula, moves that have pushed out Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars. That accusation of demographic engineering would resurface later, in arguments over whether Russia should be allowed to keep any of the ground it has settled.

• 7. Collaboration Trials

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  After Ukrainian forces liberated occupied territory, thousands of civilians faced accusations of collaboration with Russia. A single judge, without a jury, hears each case. Conviction can bring up to ten years in prison, though some of those convicted received sentences of three or five years.

  The accused include people who volunteered or held administrative posts under Russian occupation authorities. Those judgments about who collaborated and who resisted are decided entirely within Ukraine's own legal system, far from the international bodies that have spent a decade arguing over the occupation's legality.

• 8. Contested Peace Terms

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  As of 2024, Ukraine's peace terms call for Russian forces to leave the occupied territories entirely. Russia's terms call for the opposite: keeping all the land it currently occupies, plus the rest of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts it claims but does not control. Several Western-based analysts argue that letting Russia keep the seized land would "reward the aggressor while punishing the victim." They warn it would set a dangerous precedent, encouraging further expansion against Ukraine and its neighbors.

  Zelenskyy has compared the demand to appeasement, saying, "It's the same thing Hitler did, when he said 'give me a part of Czechoslovakia and it'll end here.'" Leo Litra of the European Council on Foreign Relations has pointed out that Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea did not stop further Russian aggression. Opinion polls show a majority of Ukrainians oppose giving up any territory in exchange for peace.

  In March 2014, 100 of 193 UN member states voted not to recognize Russia's annexation of Crimea. Only ten countries, including Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela, voted against that resolution. The UN passed further resolutions on human rights in Crimea and Sevastopol in December 2016, December 2017, and December 2018, each condemning the occupation and reaffirming non-recognition of the annexation.

  In April 2018, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe recognized occupied Ukrainian regions as territories under the Russian Federation's effective control. Ukraine's delegation chair, Volodymyr Aryev, wrote that the finding shifts responsibility for crimes in those territories onto Russia itself. Ukraine's government has run a dedicated ministry to oversee occupied territories since the 20th of April 2016, now called the Ministry of Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories, led since the 4th of November 2021 by Iryna Vereshchuk. Her ministry's task, restoring Ukrainian control over ground still measured in thousands of square kilometers, remains unfinished.