Original Russian-language document. Presidential instructions (poruchieniia) issued in 2025 concerning the extension of the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation's activities to the four occupied Ukrainian oblasts formally annexed in September 2022. The Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation (Fond "Zaschitniki Otechestva") was established by Presidential Decree in April 2023 as the primary social support body for Russian combat veterans and their families. The document is sourced from the Kremlin and placed in the LPR collection as a significant post-annexation integration instrument affecting the occupied territories.
These presidential instructions direct the extension of the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation to the four occupied Ukrainian oblasts — Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson — that Russia has formally annexed. The Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation was established by Putin in April 2023 as a state body to provide personalised social support, rehabilitation, and psychological assistance to veterans of the "special military operation" and their families. Its extension to the occupied territories in 2025 serves several functions: it provides social welfare infrastructure for the growing population of combat veterans and disabled service personnel in the occupied regions; it creates an additional institutional presence of the Russian federal government in these territories; and it generates loyalty and dependency relationships with military families that function as a social stabilisation mechanism. The Foundation's presence in the occupied territories is also relevant to the education and militarisation theme: the Foundation runs programmes in schools to honour "heroes" of the war, contributes to patriotic education curricula, and facilitates the social normalisation of military service. The document is included in the collection as evidence of the ongoing administrative integration of the occupied territories into Russian federal social-welfare systems, specifically those tied to military mobilisation.
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Subject matter
The instructions direct relevant government bodies and the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation to ensure that the Foundation's operations, services, and branch infrastructure are extended to the territories of Donetsk People's Republic (now Donetsk Oblast), Luhansk People's Republic (now Luhansk Oblast), Zaporizhzhia Oblast, and Kherson Oblast, in accordance with the Foundation's mandate and applicable federal law.
Key directions
- Establishment of regional branches of the Foundation in each of the four occupied oblasts.
- Extension of the personal curator service to veterans and their families resident in the occupied territories.
- Integration of the Foundation's rehabilitation, psychological support, and prosthetics programmes into the healthcare and social support infrastructure of the occupied oblasts.
- Coordination with regional executive bodies on the identification of veterans and war-disabled persons eligible for Foundation support.
Analytical note
The Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation is not a neutral welfare body: it is an instrument of what Russian officials explicitly describe as "militarisation of society." Its school-based programmes teach children that service in the "special military operation" is honourable and heroic; its community events normalise the presence of veterans and weapons in civilian life; and its media output frames the war in exclusively patriotic terms. The extension of this body to occupied Ukrainian territories is, therefore, not only a social welfare measure but an ideological integration tool, consistent with the analysis of education militarisation documented across the TOT Insights collection.