After sidestepping questions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for much of the 2024 US presidential campaign, former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance have breathed new life into talk of negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow to settle the war — with many of these discussions involving Ukraine surrendering territory to Russia.
One crucial element is left out — the fate of the millions of Ukrainians who would be surrendered with that land. Given the rampant human rights abuses already documented in Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia, their fate must be remembered in any plan to end the war.
While millions of Ukrainians fled west when Russia launched its 2022 invasion, some 3.5 million remain in the occupied territories. For over two-and-a-half years, they have experienced forced Russification, seizure of their homes and property, persecution at the hands of secret police, and forced deportation — including tens of thousands of children forcibly raised as Russians.
After leveling cities like Mariupol to force them into the Russian Federation, occupation authorities set about replacing local road signs bearing the Ukrainian language with replacements solely in Russian. For the millions of Ukrainians in their charge, Russian authorities have also pushed a longstanding policy of passportization — forcing locals to accept Russian citizenship by making its passports and documents mandatory for basic functions such as medical care, getting or keeping jobs, and accessing transportation.
Men who accept Russian passports also risk forcible conscription to fight against their own people, and Ukrainians are reportedly encouraged to change their names to sound more Russian when accepting the new documents.
Beyond being forced into surrendering their citizenship, Ukrainians under occupation are also suffering persecution at the hands of occupation authorities and the FSB, including torture, surveillance, abduction, and murder.
Investigations into conditions in the occupied territories have revealed rampant persecution and torture at the hands of Russian authorities. A recent September UN investigation found that “the wide geographic spread of locations where torture was committed and the prevalence of shared patterns demonstrate that torture has been used as a common and acceptable practice by Russian authorities, with a sense of impunity.”
Upon liberating territories from Russian occupation, the Ukrainian military discovered numerous torture chambers. In Kherson, 10 such sites were discovered, including one designed specifically for children who were deprived of food and water, told their parents had been killed, and forced to clean the blood from adjacent chambers where adults were abused.
In July last year, the Associated Press found that thousands of Ukrainian civilians captured by Russia in the occupied territories had been tortured and coerced into brutal forced labor for their captors. They were made to dig trenches for Russian soldiers on the frontline as they prepared for the coming summer Ukrainian counteroffensive, all while having to wear Russian army uniforms — turning themselves into false targets for the Ukrainian military.
Others in occupied Zaporizhzhia were made to dig mass graves for fellow prisoners who had died in captivity. Those who refused or demurred were shot on the spot and thrown in with the other dead. Again, torture was routine for these captives, with many reporting repeated electrical shocks, beatings that crack skulls and fractured ribs, and simulated suffocation. These abuses — reminiscent of the treatment meted out to slave laborers by Germany during World War II —were only reported because some survivors escaped.
Sexual violence has been another core component of Russia’s invasion and occupation. According to one 2023 report, conflict-related sexual violence has “been used consistently by Russian forces as part of a systematic campaign of atrocities.” While Ukrainian prosecutors have registered 310 cases since the start of the full-scale invasion, they believe many more cases have gone unreported either due to trauma or an inability of survivors to report due to their remaining under occupation.
Perhaps the most insidious element of Russia’s occupation of Ukraine is the mass deportation of people — including about 20,000 children, with the intent of re-educating and raising them as Russians. The Russian government reportedly planned its deportation program in advance of the full-scale invasion, devising financial incentives for different Russian regions to take in more people as they constructed a network of dozens of camps.
Children are particularly vulnerable. A few months into the full-scale invasion, the Russian government loosened adoption laws and encouraged couples to “save” Ukrainian kids brought into Russia, with many told their real parents were either dead or had abandoned them and that Ukraine had ceased to exist. While the Ukrainian government has identified by name some 19,500 children abducted by Russia, Putin’s own “children’s rights” ombudsman—herself the new adoptive mother of a Ukrainian boy — brags that Moscow has “accepted” over 700,000 young people.
Those who assert Russia could be sated with Ukrainian territory and neutrality always ignore the reality of what Russia does to those it occupies. Its invasion of Ukraine isn’t simply about a “buffer zone” with NATO. A state doesn’t need to erase the language and abduct the children of a people to guarantee its own security. But Russian officials are plain-spoken about the imperial ideology underpinning their war.
“I hate [Ukrainians],” wrote former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. “They are scum and degenerates. They want death for us, for Russia.” Putin himself declared there is “no historical basis” for the “idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians.” Neither this [Ukrainian] nation nor this language should exist!” said one leading member of the Russian Duma. “Cleanse it all out, cleanse out all of its sources.”
Ukraine is at a precarious moment. When the Republican party selected Trump as its presidential nominee during its convention this summer, organizers passed out signs to attendees that read “Trump will end the Ukraine war,” an encapsulation of his vague promise of peace, without regard for the cost. But far more difficult is to grapple with the hard reality that any surrendering of land means sacrificing millions of Ukrainians to the genocidal aims of the Russian state.
Doug Klain is a policy analyst at Razom for Ukraine, a US-based nonprofit humanitarian aid and advocacy organization, and a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.
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