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?
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?
Civilian Life and Resistance
This theme covers what occupation is actually like for the people who stay, and what they do about it. 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, and the spectrum of refusal that runs from those complaints to the mass protests of 2022, the sabotage that followed, and the covert networks that now gather intelligence and guide strikes under a surveillance regime that has made open dissent almost impossible.
- 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?
- How do people push back, from complaint to covert resistance, and how has that changed under intensifying repression?
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?
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?
Coercion, Entrapment and Slavery
This theme covers how the occupation presses people, holds them in place and puts them to use. Coercion is the pressure: searches, fines, sentences for a slogan, the threat behind a passport application. Filtration sorts residents into release, detention or deportation. A Russian passport, taken to keep a job, a pension or a home, becomes the tether that makes a person conscriptable and chargeable. Detention becomes a reservoir of forced labour, from trench digging to "correctional" work regimes. Men are mobilised, and children are moved into camps, guardianship and military training that feed the same manpower need. This theme reads those practices as one system, tests them against the legal definitions of enslavement, forced labour and trafficking, and asks where the evidence is strong enough to hold.
- How does the occupation sort, hold and move people, and what happens to them at each stage?
- How do passportisation, document confiscation and control over housing and work keep people in place?
- Where is forced labour exacted, and who benefits from it?
- How are men conscripted and children removed, and how do those pipelines connect?
- Which of these practices meet the legal thresholds for enslavement, forced labour and trafficking?
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?
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.
- Where does the line run between lawful administration and prosecutable crime?
- 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?
The complete searchable list of all research outputs — briefings, reports, dashboards, and primary sources.
Open the catalogue →