TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Even now, safe in her new home in Estonia, Inna Vnukova says she can’t shake the terrifying memory of living under Russian occupation in eastern Ukraine at the start of the war and her family’s harrowing escape.
They hid for days in a damp basement in their village of Kudriashivka after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. In the streets, soldiers waving machine guns assaulted residents, set up checkpoints and looted homes. It was a constant bombardment.
“Everyone was very scared and afraid to go outside,” Vnukova told The Associated Press, with troops searching for Ukrainian sympathizers and civil servants like her and her husband, Oleksii Vnukov.
In mid-March, she decided that she and her 16-year-old son, Zhenya, would flee the village with her brother’s family, even though it meant temporarily leaving her husband behind. They made a risky journey by car to nearby Starobilsk, waving a white sheet amid mortar fire.
“We have already said goodbye to life, cursing this Russian world,” Vnukova, 42, said. “For four years I’ve been trying to forget this nightmare, but I can’t.”
Many Ukrainians like Vnukova fled the invading forces. Those who remained risked detention — or worse — as Russian forces eventually took control of about 20 percent of the country and an estimated 3 to 5 million people.
A new Russian life in the confiscated regions
After four years of war, life in devastated cities like Mariupol and villages like Kudriashivka remains difficult, with residents facing problems with housing, water, electricity, heat and medical care. Even President Vladimir Putin admitted that they have “a lot of really pressing, urgent problems.”
In the illegally annexed regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, Russian citizenship, language and culture are imposed on residents, including in school lessons and school textbooks. By spring 2025, about 3.5 million people in the four regions will have received Russian passports – a requirement to receive vital services such as health care.
Some in the regions say they live in fear of being accused of sympathizing with Ukraine. Many were imprisoned, beaten and killed, according to human rights activists.
Oleksii Vnukov, a court security officer, stayed in the village for almost two weeks. Russian soldiers twice threatened to kill him, including one instance where 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 through Russia before arriving in Estonia, where Inna works in a printing press and Oleksii, 43, is an electrician.
“All life is leaving the occupied territories,” Vnukov said. “People there don’t live, they just survive.”
Mykhailo Savva of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties said the Russian military’s practice of exercising “systemic and total control” in the regions continues today.
“Even though a significant number of socially active people have already been detained, Russian special services continue to identify disloyal Ukrainians, extract confessions and continue to detain people,” Savva said. “Residents face practices such as background checks, mass searches and whistleblowing on a daily basis.”
Human rights groups say Russian authorities have used “filter camps” to identify potentially disloyal individuals, as well as anyone who worked for the government, helped the Ukrainian military or had relatives in the military, along with journalists, teachers, scientists and politicians.
Stanislav Shkuta, 25, who lived in occupied Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson region, said he escaped arrest several times before arriving in Ukrainian-controlled territory in 2023. He recalled being on a bus that was stopped by Russian soldiers.
“It was horrible. Men and women were asked to strip to the waist to see if they had Ukrainian tattoos,” said Shkuta, who now lives in Estonia. “I went white with fear, wondering if I had deleted everything from my phone.”
He said his friends who remained in Nova Kakhovka say life has worsened, with suspected Ukrainian sympathizers stopped on the street or in surprise door-to-door inspections.
“Today, my friends complain that life there has become impossible,” he said.
Russia has created a “vast network of 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.
“Everybody knows that if you go to the basement, your life is worth nothing,” she said.
Russian officials have declined to comment on previous allegations by UN human rights officials that they are torturing civilians and prisoners of war.
An estimated 16,000 civilians have been illegally detained, but that number could be much higher, as many are being held incommunicado. said the Ukrainian Ombudsman for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets.
A UN report published last summer said that between July 2024 and June 2025, it spoke to 57 civilians who were detained in the occupied regions, and that 52 of them told of severe beatings, electric shocks, sexual violence, degradation and threats of violence.
A particularly famous case is that of Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna, 27, who disappeared in 2023 while reporting near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and died in Russian custody. When her body was handed over to Ukraine in 2025, it showed signs of torture, with some of her organs removed, a prosecutor said.
“Russia uses terror in the occupied territories to physically eliminate active people working in certain fields: teachers, children’s writers, musicians, mayors, journalists, environmentalists. It also intimidates the passive majority,” says Matviichuk.
Destruction in Mariupol
Early in the war, Russian forces besieged Mariupol before the port city fell in May 2022. The Russian bombing of the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theater on March 16 that year killed nearly 600 people in and around the building, an AP investigation found, in the deadliest known attack on civilians in the war.
Most of the city’s population of about half a million fled, but many hid in basements, said a former actor who huddled with his parents for months, saying they were nearly killed by Russian bombing.
The former actor, now in Estonia, spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to endanger his 76-year-old parents, still in Mariupol. They were forced to take their Russian citizenships to receive medical care, as well as a one-time payment equivalent to $1,300 per person as compensation for their destroyed home, he said.
As in other occupied cities, Russification is taking place in Mariupol, changing street names, teaching Moscow-approved curricula in schools, using Russian telephone and TV networks, and placing the city in Moscow’s time zone.
“But even today, the threat of death has not disappeared. Only those who have Russian passports can survive,” the former actor said, adding that his parents asked him not to send postcards in Ukrainian because “it could be dangerous.”
Putin “openly declares 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.
But not everyone opposes the Russian takeover of Mariupol. The former actor says half the members of his old band now support the Kremlin and believe Kiev “caused the war”.
Housing is a sore point in Mariupol, where the population is about half of what it was before 2022. New apartment blocks have risen from the ruins, but instead of going to those who lost their homes, they are being sold to Russian newcomers.
Some who lost their homes made video calls to Putin. “You said ‘we don’t abandon ours.’ Don’t we count as yours?” said one resident at a mass rally.
At least 12,191 apartments in Mariupol have been added to a list of allegedly “ownerless” and abandoned apartments to be expropriated in the first half of 2025. Thousands more are being seized elsewhere.
Moscow encourages Russian citizens to move to the occupied regions, offering a number of benefits. Teachers, doctors and cultural workers are promised salary supplements if they commit to living there for five years.
Broken infrastructure and lack of doctors
Years of war and neglect have left many occupied cities in eastern Ukraine with serious problems in the provision of heat, electricity and water.
The northeastern city of Sievierodonetsk suffered significant destruction before it fell to Russia in June 2022. Once home to 140,000 people, only 45,000 remain, most of them elderly or disabled.
Only one ambulance crew serves the entire city, and doctors and other health workers come from Russian regions such as Perm to work at his hospital, said a 67-year-old former engineer, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
But she still supports “the great work that Putin is doing” because she was born and raised in the former Soviet Union.
In Alchevsk, a city in the Luhansk region, more than half of the houses were left without heat for two months of bitter cold. Five heating stations were set up, and utility companies said more than 60 percent of municipal heating networks were in poor condition with no funds for repairs.
Even a pro-Moscow politician, Oleg Tsaryov, accused the authorities of freezing “an entire city”. When the heating system failed in 2006, he noted on social media that the Ukrainian authorities “and the whole country stepped in to help and completely replaced the faulty equipment.” But after the Russian takeover, officials “had managed to repeat this Armageddon scenario again,” he added.
In the Donetsk region, water trucks fill barrels outside apartment blocks — but they freeze solid in winter, said a resident who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions.
“There’s constant fighting over water,” she said, adding that lines to get the precious resource are “crazy” and people who are away at work often miss the arrival of trucks.
Residents of Donetsk have written a call for Putin to intervene in what has become “a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe”.
Putin acknowledged last year the difficult situation in the four regions.
“I know how difficult it is now for the residents of the liberated cities and towns. There are many really pressing and urgent problems,” he said, marking the third anniversary of the incorporation of these areas into Russia. He cited the need for reliable water supply and access to healthcare, among other issues, and said he had launched a “large-scale socioeconomic development program” for the regions.
Meanwhile, Inna Vnukova is building a new life in Estonia: she and Oleksii now have a 1-year-old daughter, Alisa. Their son is now 20 years old.
Only about 150 people — including the couple’s parents — remain in the village that was once home to 800 people, Vnukova said, adding that she would like to show her daughter the family’s native Luhansk region someday.
“For four years we’ve been dreaming of going back, but we’re wondering more and more – what will we see there?” she asked.
—-
Katie Marie Davies from Manchester, England contributed.