Governance
Governance covers the machinery of occupation: how Russia administers the territory it has seized, who runs that administration, and what it does and does not provide to the people living under it. Occupation is not only soldiers and checkpoints. It is budgets, bureaucrats, licences and registries, the apparatus through which control is made routine.
- Who is in charge, and how is the occupation administration structured?
- What is an occupying power obliged to provide, and what does Russia actually deliver?
- How does Russia fold these territories into its own legal, economic and administrative systems?
- What does the occupation's own paperwork reveal about how it really works?
See all resources in this theme
Economics
Economics covers how Russia turns occupied territory into a source of value, and who profits from doing so. This is the occupation as a going concern: grain and coal moved out through reflagged ports, confiscated property re-auctioned to new owners, residents charged rising prices for failing services, and outside firms (increasingly Chinese) wiring the whole arrangement into foreign markets. Follow the money and you see what the occupation is for, and who sustains it.
- How does Russia extract value: grain, coal, ports, property?
- Who profits, and which Russian and foreign firms are involved?
- What does the occupation cost the people who remain: prices, tariffs, wages, housing?
- What does the administration's own financial paperwork admit?
See all resources in this theme
Civilian Life
This theme covers what occupation is actually like for the people who stay. Behind the administrative and economic machinery are the conditions of an ordinary life made extraordinarily difficult: housing seized or re-registered, water and heating failing, prices outrunning wages, and the daily calculation of whether to leave, stay, or come back. It also covers what people themselves report, through the occupation's own complaint channels and through surveys of the displaced, which together give an unusually direct read on how life under occupation is experienced rather than only how it is administered.
- What is daily life like for those who remain under occupation?
- What happens to people's homes, and to the services they depend on?
- Who leaves, who stays, who returns, and why?
- What do residents themselves say, in their own complaints and in surveys?
See all resources in this theme
Identity, Culture and Religion
This theme covers what Russia tries to extinguish in the occupied territories, and what it tries to install in its place. The occupation is not only administrative and economic; it is a project to replace one people's identity with another's. That means suppressing the Ukrainian language, church, history and memory, while moving in Russian settlers, elevating the Moscow Patriarchate, and rebuilding schooling and public culture around a 'Russian world' ideology. It also covers the quieter, riskier story of how people hold on to who they are under those conditions.
- What is Russia trying to erase, and what does it install in its place?
- How is religious life controlled, and which communities are targeted?
- Who is being resettled into the occupied territories, and for what reasons?
- How do people sustain Ukrainian identity, language and faith under occupation?
See all resources in this theme
Education and Militarisation
This theme covers how Russia uses schooling, youth programmes and the removal of children to reshape a generation in occupied Ukraine. Control of children is the occupation's longest game: rewrite the curriculum, fold pupils into military-patriotic structures, deport some out of Ukraine entirely, and the occupier secures not just the territory now but the people meant to defend and populate it later. This theme follows that pipeline from the classroom to the cadet programme, and asks what the resulting cohort means for the years ahead.
- What is Russia teaching children in occupied Ukraine, and to what end?
- How does the militarisation pipeline work, from classroom to youth movement to conscription age?
- What happens to Ukrainian children deported into Russia?
- Why does this matter beyond the occupation itself, and what does the militarised cohort represent?
See all resources in this theme
Coercion, Resistance and Security
This theme covers the contest for control: how Russia enforces its occupation, how Ukrainians resist it, and the surveillance and security apparatus that has grown up between the two. Occupation is not a settled fact but an ongoing struggle. On one side, the instruments of coercion: forced passportisation, mobilisation, denunciation systems, detention. On the other, a resistance that has shifted from open defiance to covert, compartmentalised networks as surveillance has intensified. This theme follows both, and the security machinery that each is calibrated against.
- How does Russia enforce control and punish non-compliance?
- What does Ukrainian resistance look like now, and how has it changed under intensifying surveillance?
- How do people pass information and organise at survivable risk?
- What do residents themselves believe about resistance, and about their own government?
See all resources in this theme
Information Space
This theme covers how Russia controls what people in the occupied territories can know, say and believe. Occupation is held together as much by information as by force: cutting territories off from Ukrainian media, flooding them with a 'liberation' narrative, rewriting schoolbooks and local newspapers, and running surveillance and denunciation systems that make people afraid to speak. It also covers the propaganda aimed outward, at Russian and Western audiences, that frames the whole enterprise. This theme asks how that information environment is built, and what it is designed to make people do.
- How does Russia control the flow of information into and within the occupied territories?
- What narratives does the occupation tell about itself, and to whom?
- How do propaganda, schooling and surveillance reinforce one another?
- What do the occupation's own media and teaching materials reveal?
See all resources in this theme
Accountability and Legal
This theme covers the occupation as a body of crimes, and the effort to document them for a reckoning that has not yet come. Much of what the other themes describe (deportation, detention, confiscation, persecution) is not only policy but, on the evidence, a coordinated system of crimes against humanity. This theme gathers that case: the patterns, the numbers, the legal framing, and the primary records that may one day serve as evidence. It asks not only what is being done, but how it is being documented, and what accountability might eventually require.
- Which acts of the occupation amount to crimes under international law, and on what evidence?
- How many civilians are detained, deported, or disappeared, and what becomes of them?
- How is the occupation's own conduct being documented for future accountability?
- Where does the line run between lawful administration and prosecutable crime?