Coercion, Entrapment and Slavery

Occupation is usually described as control over territory. This theme starts from control over people. Across the occupied territories Russia has built a set of practices that, taken together, treat residents as a resource to be sorted, held, moved and put to work: filtration at the point of entry or exit, a network of detention sites, the conditioning of work, healthcare, pensions and housing on a Russian passport, the confiscation of documents, forced labour inside detention and outside it, the conscription of men who were Ukrainian citizens three years ago, and the removal of children into camps, guardianship and military training. None of these practices is new to Russian or Soviet rule. What is distinctive is how tightly they lock together.

The three words of the title mark a gradient. Coercion is pressure: the search, the fine, the sentence for a slogan, the threat that makes a passport application feel like a choice. Entrapment is being held in place once the pressure has worked. Slavery is the point at which a person is no longer pressed but used. The word is meant in its legal sense, not as a metaphor. The 1926 Slavery Convention defines slavery as the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised, and the Rome Statute lists enslavement, expressly including trafficking in persons, among the acts that constitute crimes against humanity.¹ International tribunals have set out what counts in practice: control of a person's movement and physical environment, measures to prevent escape, force or the threat of force, the exaction of forced labour, and the absence of consent or free will.² This theme asks how much of what happens under occupation meets that test, and where the evidence is strongest.

Entrapment is the middle term, and it describes the condition most residents actually live in. Few are held in a cell. Many are held in place by a passport they had to take to keep a job or a pension, by a home that would be declared "ownerless" if they left, by an exit route that runs through filtration, or by a son of conscription age who cannot cross a checkpoint. The trap is administrative before it is physical, and it is built so that the ordinary business of surviving, registering a flat, drawing a pension, signing a work contract, is what tightens it.

This theme follows the whole chain, from the filtration point to the trench, the colony, the recruitment office and the children's camp, and asks what holds it together. It draws on the Hub's monitoring inside the occupied territories, on the legal and testimonial record assembled with Ukrainian partners, and on the occupation's own decrees and court records. It also points to where Ukrainian and international accountability efforts can take hold.

Questions we ask

1. How does the occupation sort, hold and move people, and what happens to them at each stage?
2. How do passportisation, document confiscation and control over housing and work keep people in place?
3. Where is forced labour exacted, in what forms, and who benefits from it?
4. How are men conscripted and children removed, and how do those two pipelines connect?
5. Which of these practices meet the legal thresholds for enslavement, forced labour and trafficking, and on what evidence?

The full picture

The sorting stage: filtration. From March 2022, leaving Mariupol, or moving between occupied districts, meant passing through "filtration": phone searches, interrogation, fingerprinting and photographing, and checks against lists of former servicemen, officials and activists.³ Filtration decides which of three paths a person follows: release with a stamp, transfer into detention, or deportation into Russia. Documents are routinely confiscated at this stage, so that a person who passes filtration may still be unable to leave, and Ukraine's own return framework, coherent on paper, is often unreachable in practice for people who no longer hold papers.⁴ Filtration is therefore not only a security screen. It is the intake procedure for everything that follows.

Detention as a reservoir. The UN human rights monitoring mission has documented a network of well over a hundred official and unofficial places of detention in the occupied territories and inside Russia holding Ukrainian civilians, with torture and ill-treatment recorded in the great majority of cases it was able to examine.⁵ Inside that network, labour is routine. Survivor testimony collected by Ukrainian human rights organisations describes detainees made to dig fortifications, carry munitions, dismantle rubble, and clean and cook for the units holding them; it describes detainees handed from a pre-trial centre to a military unit for weeks of trench digging under armed guard; and it describes a mechanism that keeps the labour regime in place, the knowledge that relatives can be seized if a detainee refuses.⁶ The penitentiary system extends the cycle: pre-trial centre, colony, then "correctional centre", a regime that monitors describe as a way of formalising civilian detention while involving detainees in forced labour, and transfer to colonies deep inside Russia, often without notice to families.⁷ Occupation courts add a further layer. Sentences of hundreds of hours of "compulsory labour" are handed down for speech offences, including 400 hours in Kherson oblast for the words "Glory to Ukraine", and the sentencing record of the occupation court in Zaporizhzhia shows how routinely such penalties are applied.⁸

Passports, papers and property: the administrative trap. Russia's April 2023 decree gave residents of the annexed regions until mid-2024 to obtain Russian citizenship or be treated as foreigners liable to deportation, and Human Rights Watch has documented how passportisation was enforced through threats, detention and the denial of essential services.⁹ The Hub's monitors record what that means on the ground: searches and fines for holding a Ukrainian passport, a ban on public-sector and budget-sector employment without a Russian one, and a life that becomes "progressively less viable" without it.¹⁰ Housing works the same way. In Mariupol some 25,000 homes have been placed on "ownerless property" lists that absent owners must return to contest, and a federal constitutional law of December 2025 now generalises the mechanism.¹¹ Pensions can be turned into a lever too: in October 2025 the Mariupol administration deliberately triggered a deportation panic among pensioners who had taken Russian passports, using the threat of citizenship-stripping to generate pressure without any formal act.¹² The passport, once taken, creates liabilities of its own. It places a man on the military register. It also changes the criminal article: contact with Ukraine that would be charged as espionage for a foreigner becomes treason for a citizen, with sentences of twelve years to life.¹³

Forced labour outside the cell. The clearest documented cases sit at the two ends of the labour market. At the bottom, residents of Mariupol were put to clearing rubble in exchange for food in 2022, and the Hub's monitors continue to record "military restoration works" paid in food packages and "subbotnik" campaigns substituting unpaid labour for municipal services.¹⁴ At the top, employees of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant were prevented from leaving in 2022 and pressed to sign contracts with the Russian operator, coercion that the International Labour Organization has described as forced labour.¹⁵ The law here is not obscure. The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids an occupying power from compelling protected persons to work on military operations, from using measures that create unemployment to induce people to work for it, and from compelling them to serve in its armed forces.¹⁶ The gap is in enforcement: Ukraine's collaboration law reaches Ukrainians who work for the occupier, but the systematic forced labour and recruitment of civilians by Russian citizens falls outside it, a problem the Hub's legal briefing on employment under occupation sets out in detail.¹⁵

Conscription and recruitment. Mobilisation in the occupied Donbas began before the full-scale invasion, with the "DNR" and "LNR" general mobilisation decrees of February 2022, and continues through regular call-ups such as the "LNR" spring 2025 decree covering men born between 1995 and 2007.¹⁷ Passportisation feeds it: citizenship brings military registration, and registration brings liability. Alongside compulsion runs inducement aimed at the vulnerable. Recruitment posters photographed in Mariupol offer sign-on payments of up to several million roubles, debt write-offs and the suspension of criminal proceedings against the recruit and his relatives, and the Hub's monitors have recorded recruitment drives among pre-trial detainees and round-ups of labour migrants under the guise of migration inspections.¹⁸ A translated column on the BARS-Zaporizhzhia unit shows the other face of the same system: occupation does not only break people, it also buys those who do not need to be broken.¹⁹

Children as the long-cycle supply. Ukraine has identified more than 20,000 children deported to Russia and Belarus, of whom fewer than 2,500 have been returned, and independent researchers have mapped hundreds of facilities involved in their re-education and placement.²⁰ Those who remain are folded into military-patriotic structures whose stated purpose is to prepare them for service. The Hub's own analysis of the Voin network argues that the programme is designed to resolve Russia's mobilisation problem, and its peer-reviewed work on child deportation reads the removal of children as a means of maintaining authority over the territory.²¹ Ukrainian legal analyses have argued that the transfer of children into guardianship, adoption and military training can be assessed under the enslavement provision, which expressly includes trafficking in children. The Education and Militarisation theme follows the pipeline from classroom to camp in detail; this theme is concerned with where it ends.

Sexual violence and sexual slavery. The UN Commission of Inquiry has found that Russian authorities have used sexual violence as a form of torture in detention, against men and women, and Ukrainian organisations have documented cases of sexual slavery and the trafficking of women and girls out of the occupied territories.²² Sexual slavery and enforced prostitution are listed crimes against humanity in their own right. They belong in this theme because they occur inside the same detention and occupation system, and because the trafficking of a person for sexual exploitation is enslavement in its most direct legal form.

What holds it together. Read separately, each of these practices has been documented and condemned. Read together, they describe a single machine. Filtration is the switchboard that routes people into release, detention or deportation. The passport is the tether that keeps the released in place and makes them chargeable and conscriptable. Detention is the reservoir from which labour and recruits are drawn. Conscription and the removal of children are the long-cycle supply, the occupation reproducing its own manpower from the population it holds. This is the argument this theme sets out to test, and it has an accountability form: the Hub's work on Russia's pipeline of persecution describes seven interlocking crimes against humanity operating as one system, with enslavement among them.²³

Where the evidence is strong, and where it is thin. The strongest evidence concerns filtration, detention, passport-conditioned access to work and services, and forced labour in and around detention: each rests on survivor testimony, UN documentation and the occupation's own legal acts. Coerced employment at critical infrastructure is anchored by an international finding. The removal and militarisation of children is the best-quantified strand. Three practices remain under-documented and are priorities for the Hub's monitoring: the use of forced or convict labour in reconstruction contracting, the labour of convicts in colonies on occupied territory, and the trafficking of adults into labour inside Russia after deportation. Where the record is incomplete, this theme says so.