Demographic Crime: How Russia is Repopulating Occupied Territories
Such actions are a flagrant violation of international laws which protects civilians in wartime.
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Demographic Crime: How Russia is Repopulating Occupied Territories
Such actions are a flagrant violation of international laws which protects civilians in wartime.
Experts believe that - beginning with the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the seizure of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions - Russia is engaging in a systematic campaign to change the demographic composition of Ukraine’s occupied territories.
This policy involves forcibly deporting Ukrainians to distant parts of Russia while repopulating seized lands with other ethnic groups. Such actions are a flagrant violation of international law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention, which protects civilians in wartime.
“We are able to document these cases thanks to our active, concerned citizens in the temporarily occupied territories who provide us with this information,” explained a spokesperson from The National Resistance Centre (NRC), a body created by the Special Operations Forces immediately after the full-scale invasion to support training and coordinating efforts against the occupation of Ukraine.
The spokesperson, who uses the alias Lypa for security reasons, said that most of the investigations into forced demographic changes in the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions remained in the pre-trial phase. However, a few cases were now proceeding to court.
Two Russian citizens have been sentenced in absentia to ten years in prison for deporting Ukrainians from the occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia region. Another trial is also underway against Russian officials and collaborators for the deportation of Ukrainian children from the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions.
The main concern is that Russian nationals, brought into Ukraine’s occupied territories, are moving into the homes of Ukrainians whose fates remain unknown. Lypa said that while legal proceedings were underway regarding the settlement of Russians in Ukrainian homes, no court decisions have been made public yet.
“Cities along the Sea of Azov are the most affected by this resettlement,” she continued. “The Russian authorities are marketing this housing and the region as a whole as luxury seaside property, even in places where the buildings are nothing but ruins.”
Lypa highlighted Mariupol as effectively a propaganda tool for the Kremlin, which first claimed to be liberating the city and is now supposedly rebuilding it.
“This is also happening in other cities like Berdiansk, Henichesk, Donetsk and Luhansk. Demographic changes are still underway in these areas, as Ukrainians who have fled the occupied territories find it extremely difficult to prove their property rights to the Russian authorities.”
According to Lypa, Russian authorities frequently declare the homes of Ukrainians ownerless and then seized them for their own purposes.
In other cases, Ukrainians are declared to be enemies of the people, saboteurs or spies for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. They may also be told that an attack on the area is imminent and that leaving is necessary.
Lypa said that the largest groups moved into the occupied territories were indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation including Buryats, Ossetians and Dagestanis. Russia uses them as a labour force to rebuild cities.
Russian authorities are also encouraging the so-called educated elite – teachers and doctors – to relocate to the occupied territories.
“There are substantial payments for teachers,” said Lypa. “At first, it was a one-time bonus of one million roubles (12,500 US dollars), which later became two million (25,000 dollars). The salaries are high. They were even given a status equivalent to combat participants with corresponding social benefits packages.”
Cases of repopulation are documented using various information sources, primarily, from the testimonies of Ukrainians living in these areas. Concerned citizens send information about Russian activities to a chatbot for the National Resistance Centre. This information is then verified by units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, intelligence services and Special Operations Forces.
“We have a very large network of our own people and resistance members in the temporarily occupied territories. They check and confirm the information. This is how we document these crimes,” said Lypa.
Crimes involving Ukrainians who collaborate with the Russians are investigated as a separate category. Cases where this cooperation was forced and necessary for survival are also taken into consideration.
Holding Russia Accountable
Human rights advocate Serhii Lankin explained that Russia was violating international humanitarian law by moving its own citizens into occupied Ukrainian territories. This action breaches numerous international agreements, including the Fourth Geneva Convention (Article 49), Additional Protocol I (Article 85), the 1907 Hague Convention (IV) and the Rome Statute.
While evicting Russian settlers may appear legally straightforward – as Ukrainian and international law support the restitution of property – the process of holding the Russian occupiers accountable is a much greater challenge.
A precedent can be found in the case of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) and Serbian paramilitary forces during the ethnic cleansing in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s. At that time, thousands of Croats and Muslims were forcibly displaced from their homes. The act was classified as a war crime under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
“Ukraine has already submitted a referral to the International Criminal Court regarding the deportations, particularly of Ukrainian children, and the pressure on Ukrainians in Crimea and other regions as a war crime,” Lankin explained.
Challenges in cooperation extend to the International Criminal Court (ICC). Prior to 2022, the ICC had not opened a single case concerning deportations from Crimea, despite
The Prosecutor’s Office of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea is investigating Russia’s forced demographic changes as a war crime. However, Ukrainian law currently lacks specific statutes addressing crimes such as deportation, changing the ethnic composition of a region or repopulation.
Vitalii Sekretar, the first deputy head of the Prosecutor’s Office for the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, said that investigators were searching for eyewitnesses and victims of repopulation, but that in most cases people who left the occupied territories were afraid to testify about what they have witnessed. These Ukrainian victims primarily fear reprisals from the Russians, either against themselves or their relatives who remain under occupation.
Sekretar said his office’s work was currently focused on deportation cases, adding, “The crime of deportation is unique in that the deportation of even a single person is considered a war crime.”
Investigators have established that 12,000 people were deported from Crimea through court rulings.
“This is a situation where a person was in Crimea but refused to obtain Russian citizenship,” Sekretar said. “Currently, a team of just five prosecutors with specialised experience is handling the investigation into the deportation of Ukrainians from the peninsula.”
To date, they have identified 18 suspects accused of forcing Ukrainians to leave by applying Russian occupation laws, with 15 of these cases sent to court. The Prosecutor’s Office for the Autonomous Republic of Crimea has already secured six convictions for war crimes related to deportation and repopulation – the first such verdicts for Russian crimes in Crimea. All convicted individuals remain at large in the occupied territories or in Russia itself. Most of the suspects are judges – both Ukrainian collaborators who sided with the occupation authorities and Russian nationals appointed to courts in Crimea. Three more suspects were identified in late September 2025.
For the crime of deportation, Russian citizens and Ukrainian collaborators face sentences of ten to 12 years in prison. However, all verdicts issued to date have been in absentia.
