TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Even now, safe in her new home in Estonia, Inna Vanukova says she can’t shake the horrific memories of living in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine at the start of the war and her family’s harrowing escape.
After a full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, they hid in a damp basement in their village of Kudriashivka. In the streets, soldiers brandishing machine guns threatened residents, set up checkpoints and ransacked homes. There was constant shelling.
“Everyone was very scared and afraid to go out,” Vanukova told The Associated Press, adding that the military was looking for Ukrainian sympathizers and civil servants like her and her husband, Oleksiy Vanukov.
In mid-March, she decided that she and her 16-year-old son, Zhenya, would flee the village with her brother’s family, even if it meant temporarily leaving her husband behind. They made the perilous journey by car to nearby Starobilsk, waving white sheets amid mortar fire.
“We said goodbye to life, cursing this Russian world,” said 42-year-old Vanukova. For four years I have been trying to forget this nightmare, but I can’t.”
Many Ukrainians, like Vnukova, fled the invading forces. As Russian forces eventually took control of about 20% of the country and its estimated 3 million to 5 million people – those who remained risked detention – or worse.
New, Russian life in the occupied territories
After four years of war, life is tough in shattered cities like Mariupol and villages like Kudriashivka, with residents struggling with housing, water, electricity, heat and healthcare. Even President Vladimir Putin has admitted they have “many really pressing, urgent problems”.
In the illegally occupied territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia, Russian citizenship, language and culture are forced on residents, including in school texts and textbooks. By spring 2025, around 3.5 million people in the four regions had been granted Russian passports – a requirement to access vital services such as healthcare.
Some in the regions said they live in fear of being accused of sympathizing with Ukraine. Many have been imprisoned, beaten and killed, according to human rights activists.
Court security officer Oleksiy Vanukov stayed in the village for about two weeks. Russian soldiers twice threatened to kill him, including when he and a friend were dragged off the road by soldiers. But he survived and soon fled the village.
The family traveled through Russia before reaching Estonia, where Inna works in a printing house and Oleksiy, 43, is an electrician.
“All life is leaving the occupied territory,” Vanukov said. “The people there aren’t living, they’re just living.”
Mykhailo Sava, of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, said the Russian military’s practice of “systematic and total control” of the regions continues today.
“Although a significant number of socially active people have already been detained, Russian special services continue to identify disloyal Ukrainians, extract statements and detain people,” Savva said. “Residents face practices like document checks, mass searches and condemnations on a daily basis.”
Human rights groups said Russian authorities used “filtration camps” to identify potentially disloyal people, including those who work for the government, support the Ukrainian military or have relatives in the military, journalists, teachers, scientists and politicians.
Stanislav Shukuta, 25, who lives in occupied Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson region, said he escaped arrest several times before arriving in Ukrainian-controlled territory in 2023. He recalled being on a bus that was stopped by Russian soldiers.
“It was scary. Men and women were asked to strip their waists to see if they had Ukrainian tattoos,” said Shukuta, who now lives in Estonia. “I turned white with fear, wondering if I had cleared everything on my phone.”
He said his friends living in Nova Kakhovka said life had deteriorated, with suspected Ukrainian sympathizers being stopped on the street or subjected to surprise door-to-door inspections.
“My friends today complain that life there is impossible,” he said.
Russia has “established a vast network of secret and official detention centers where tens of thousands of Ukrainian citizens are held indefinitely without charge,” said Oleksandra Matvichuk, head of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Center for Civil Liberties.
“Everybody knows that if you end up in the basement, your life is worthless,” she said.
Russian officials have declined to comment on past allegations by UN human rights officials of torturing civilians and prisoners of war.
About 16,000 citizens are illegally detained, but this number may be higher because many are being held illegally. Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said.
A UN report released last summer said it spoke to 57 civilians detained in the occupied territories between July 2024 and June 2025, and 52 of them reported severe beatings, electric shocks, sexual violence, torture and threats of violence.
A particularly well-known case is that of Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roschyna, 27, who disappeared in 2023 while reporting near the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant and died in Russian custody. When his body was handed over to Ukraine in 2025, it showed signs of torture, with some of his organs removed, a prosecutor said.
“Russia uses terror in the occupied territories to physically remove active people working in certain fields: teachers, children’s writers, musicians, mayors, journalists, environmentalists. It also intimidates the passive majority,” says Matvichuk.
Destruction in Mariupol
At the start of the war, Russian forces besieged Mariupol before the port city fell in May 2022. A Russian bombing of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater on March 16 of that year killed nearly 600 people in and around the building, an AP investigation found, in the deadliest known attack on civilians in the war.
Most of the town’s population of about 1.5 million fled but many hid in basements, a former actor who lived with his parents for months, saying they had been killed by Russian bombing.
The former actor, now in Estonia, spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid endangering his 76-year-old parents, still in Mariupol. They had to obtain Russian citizenship to receive medical care, as well as a one-time payment equal to $1,300 per person as compensation for their destroyed homes, he said.
As in other occupied cities, Mariupol is undergoing Russification, renaming streets, teaching a Moscow-approved curriculum in schools, using Russian phone and TV networks, and placing the city in the Moscow time zone.
“But even today, the threat of death has not gone away. Only those with Russian passports can survive,” the former actor said, adding that his parents have asked him not to send postcards in Ukrainian because “it could be dangerous.”
Putin “openly says that there is no Ukrainian language, Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian nation. And in the occupied territories these words are turning into terrible practice,” Matvychuk said.
But not everyone opposes the Russian takeover of Mariupol. The former actor says half of his old band members now support the Kremlin and believe Kiev has “provoked the war”.
Housing is a pain point in Mariupol, where the population is almost half of what it was before 2022. New apartment blocks have risen from the ruins, but instead of going to those who lost their homes, they are sold to Russian newcomers.
Some who lost their homes have made video appeals to Putin. “You said we would not ‘give up our cause.’ Aren’t we your own?” A local said in a public meeting.
At least 12,191 apartments in Mariupol have been added to the list of allegedly “ownerless” and abandoned flats to be occupied in the first half of 2025. Thousands are being captured elsewhere.
Moscow is encouraging Russian citizens to move to the occupied territories, offering several benefits. Teachers, doctors and cultural workers are promised salary supplements if they commit to stay there for five years.
Crumbling infrastructure and lack of doctors
Years of war and neglect have left many occupied cities in eastern Ukraine with serious problems with heat, electricity and water supplies.
The northeastern city of Sivierodonetsk suffered significant damage before falling to Russia in June 2022. Once home to 140,000 people, only 45,000 remain, most of them elderly or disabled.
Only one ambulance crew serves the entire city, and doctors and other health workers travel from Russian regions such as Perm to work at its hospital, said the 67-year-old former engineer, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
But she still supports “the great work that Putin is doing” because she was born and raised in the former Soviet Union.
In Alchevsk, a city in the Luhansk region, more than half of the homes have been without heat for two bitterly cold months. Five warming stations have been installed and utility companies say that more than 60% of municipal heating networks are in poor condition, without funding for repairs.
Pro-Moscow politician Oleg Tsariov also accused authorities of freezing “the whole city”. When the heating system failed in 2006, he noted on social media that the Ukrainian authorities “and the whole country stepped forward to help and completely replaced the faulty equipment.” But after the Russian takeover, officials “planned to repeat this Armageddon scenario again,” he added.
In the Donetsk region, water trucks fill barrels outside apartment blocks – but they freeze solid in winter, said a resident who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared the consequences.
“There is constant fighting over water,” she said, adding that lines to get the precious resource are “crazy” and people away at work miss the arrival of trucks.
Residents of Donetsk wrote an appeal to Putin to intervene in the “humanitarian and environmental disaster”.
Putin acknowledged the plight of the four regions last year.
“I know how difficult it is for the residents of the liberated towns and cities now. There are many really pressing, urgent problems,” he said, marking the third anniversary of the territories’ incorporation into Russia. He said he had launched a “large-scale socioeconomic development program” for the region, citing the need for reliable water supply and access to healthcare, among other issues.
Meanwhile, Inna Vanukova is building a new life in Estonia: she and Oleksi now have a 1-year-old daughter, Alisa. Their son is now 20 years old.
Only about 150 people — including the couple’s parents — remain in the village that was once home to 800, Vnukova said, adding that she wants to show her daughter the family’s native Luhansk region someday.
“We’ve been dreaming of going back for four years, but we’re increasingly wondering – what will we see there?” she asked.
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Contributed by Katie Marie Davies in Manchester, England.
