About this register
The register belongs to the hub's Coercion, Entrapment and Slavery theme. Its premise is simple: people who are not paid but keep working, because they cannot leave and there is no other employer, are held in place by their wages as surely as by a checkpoint. The occupation does not publish arrears statistics for the territories it holds. What it does publish, through the regional prosecutor offices, is a stream of announcements that a debt at a named or unnamed employer has been "repaid after the intervention of the prosecutor". Read one at a time they are good-news items. Read together they are the most complete public record of where, in what sectors and on what scale wages go unpaid under occupation.
How it was built
The Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson sections of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation's portal were searched with eight Russian query strings covering wage arrears, non-payment of wages, arrears of pay and workers' labour rights. Every result whose title referred to wages, arrears, workers or payments was downloaded, and every announcement whose text states a wage-arrears case was kept. Employer, sector, workers, sum, pay period, measures and outcome were extracted from the announcement text and checked against the source sentence, which is reproduced in each entry. Nothing is estimated: where the prosecutor did not state a figure, the field is blank.
What the register shows
- Where the arrears are. Luhansk accounts for nearly half of all cases. Across the four oblasts, utilities, housing services and municipal or state enterprises make up more than half of the register: water and heat utilities, housing management companies, municipal transport, cultural institutions and district administrations. The occupation's own public sector is its largest wage debtor.
- How big the cases are. The median case involves about seventy workers. The largest are structural: five coal enterprises under the Luhansk fuel ministry owing more than 1 billion roubles to more than 2,000 miners (September 2025); the Kherson education ministry and its institutions owing 300 million roubles for a single month to 7,700 staff (April 2024); three Donetsk coal enterprises owing 261 million roubles to 6,032 workers (November to December 2024); and the Dniprorudne iron-ore combine in Zaporizhzhia oblast owing 93 million roubles to 3,552 workers (March 2026).
- How long people wait. Where the pay period is stated, most cases cover one or two months, but more than a quarter cover three months or longer, and the register includes arrears running to ten, twelve and fifteen months.
- What enforcement looks like. The standard instrument is a representation to management, recorded in 181 entries. Administrative cases under Article 5.27 of the Code of Administrative Offences appear in 39, court claims on behalf of workers in 20, and criminal cases under Article 145.1 of the Criminal Code in only 10. In 168 entries the prosecutor reports that the debt was paid in full.
What it is not
The register records what the occupation prosecutors chose to announce. It is a floor, not a measure of arrears in the territories. It omits cases the prosecutors did not act on or did not publicise, arrears at enterprises outside their reach, and unpaid or in-kind labour for the Russian armed forces, which the hub's monitoring reports separately. The claim that a debt was "paid in full" is the prosecutor's and is recorded as the reported outcome, not verified. Three entries are aggregate statements, such as an annual total of arrears recovered, and are flagged so that they are not summed with the cases. One entry is flagged as a possible duplicate announcement.
Place names
Localities are given in Ukrainian transliteration. Where the occupation authorities use a Soviet-era name that Ukraine changed after 2016, the Ukrainian name follows in brackets, so Torez (Chystiakove), Krasnodon (Sorokyne), Stakhanov (Kadiivka). Employer names and the key sentence are reproduced in the original Russian so that each entry can be checked against its source.
| # | Date | Oblast | Employer | Workers | Arrears, RUB m | Outcome |
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