Russian-Run Areas of Ukraine Suffer    02/20 06:27

   

   TALLINN, Estonia (AP) -- Nearly four years into its full-scale invasion, 
Russia controls about 20% of Ukrainian territory. Many of the estimated 3 
million to 5 million people who remain in regions under Moscow's control face 
housing, water, power, heat and health care woes.

   Even President Vladimir Putin has acknowledged "many truly pressing, urgent 
problems" in the regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, which 
were illegally annexed by Moscow months after the all-out war began on Feb. 24, 
2022.

   Russian citizenship, language and culture is forced upon residents, 
including in school lesson plans and textbooks.

   Some residents live in fear of being accused of sympathizing with Kyiv, 
according to Ukrainians who have left. Many have been imprisoned, beaten and 
killed, according to human rights activists.

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

   Russian officials have refused to comment on past allegations by U.N. human 
rights officials that it tortures civilians and prisoners of war.

   One family's plight

   Inna Vnukova spent the first days of the Russian occupation in the Luhansk 
region hiding in a damp basement with her family. Outside in her village of 
Kudriashivka, soldiers bullied residents, set up checkpoints and looted homes. 
There was constant shelling.

   "Everyone was very scared and afraid to go outside," Vnukova told The 
Associated Press in Estonia, where she now lives. The troops sought out 
officials and civil servants like her and her husband, Oleksii Vnukov.

   In mid-March 2022, she and her 16-year-old son, Zhenya, fled the village 
with her brother's family, even though it meant leaving her husband behind 
temporarily. They risked a trip by car to nearby Starobilsk, waving a white 
sheet amid mortar fire.

   Oleksii Vnukov, a court security officer, stayed for nearly two weeks. 
Russian soldiers twice threatened to kill him before he escaped.

   "The people there aren't living, they're just surviving," he said of the 150 
people -- including the couple's parents -- who still live in the village that 
once was home to 800.

   Vnukova and her husband have a new life in Estonia, where she works in a 
printing house and he is an electrician. Their son is now 20, and they have a 
1-year-old daughter, Alisa.

   Life in shattered Mariupol

   Russian forces besieged Mariupol for weeks before the port city fell in May 
2022. The bombing of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater on March 16 of 
that year killed nearly 600 people in and around the building, an AP 
investigation found -- the war's single deadliest known attack against 
civilians.

   Most of the population of about a half-million fled but many hid in 
basements, said a former actor who huddled for months with his parents.

   The former actor, now in Estonia, spoke on condition of anonymity to not 
endanger his 76-year-old parents, still in Mariupol. They took Russian 
citizenship to get medical care and a one-time payment equivalent to $1,300 per 
person as compensation for their destroyed home, he said.

   Housing remains a problem even though the population is about half of what 
it was before the war. New apartments are sold to Russian newcomers -- not 
those who lost their homes, according to complaints sent by video to Putin.

   Not everyone opposes the Russian takeover. The former actor says half of the 
members of his old troupe support the Kremlin. Still, he said his parents asked 
him not to send postcards in Ukrainian because "it could be dangerous."

   Crumbling infrastructure

   Years of war and neglect have saddled many cities with crumbling municipal 
services.

   In Alchevsk, a city in the Luhansk region, over half the homes are without 
heat in this bitterly cold winter. Five warming stations have been set up.

   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 because she feared repercussions. "There's constant squabbling over 
water," she said.

   Moscow encourages Russians to move to the occupied regions, offering various 
benefits. Teachers, doctors and cultural workers are promised salary 
supplements if they live there for five years.

   The northeastern city of Sievierodonetsk, once home to 140,000 people, 
suffered significant damage and now has only 45,000 mostly elderly or disabled 
residents. Only one ambulance crew serves the city, and Russian medical workers 
rotate in to staff its hospital, said a 67-year-old former engineer who spoke 
on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

   "I know how difficult it is now for the residents of the liberated cities 
and towns. There are many truly pressing, urgent problems," Putin said in 
September. He cited the need for reliable water supplies and access to health 
care, and said he has launched a "large-scale socioeconomic development 
program" for the regions.

   Living in fear

   Stanislav Shkuta, 25, from Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson region, said he 
narrowly escaped arrest several times before reaching Ukrainian-controlled 
territory in 2023. He recalled being on a bus that was stopped by Russian 
soldiers, and "men and women were asked to strip to the waist to see if they 
had Ukrainian tattoos."

   Shkuta, now in Estonia, said he "turned white with fear, wondering if I'd 
cleared everything on my phone."

   Friends who stayed in Nova Kakhovka say life has worsened, with suspected 
Ukrainian sympathizers stopped on the street or in surprise door-to-door 
inspections, he added.

   Mykhailo Savva of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine said "Russian 
special services continue to identify disloyal Ukrainians, extract confessions, 
and continue to detain people," with residents facing document checks and mass 
searches.

   Human rights groups say Russia used "filtration camps" early in the war to 
identify potentially disloyal individuals, as well as anyone who worked for the 
government, helped the Ukrainian army or had relatives in the military, along 
with journalists, teachers, scientists and politicians.

   About 16,000 civilians have been detained illegally, but that number could 
be much higher because many are held incommunicado, said Ukrainian Human Rights 
Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets.