the Visual Journalism team - BBC News
Thu, February 19, 2026
[BBC]
The war in Ukraine is about to enter its fifth year. Over the past year, Russian forces have slowly expanded the amount of territory they control, mostly in the east of Ukraine, and have continued their barrage of air strikes on Kyiv and other cities.
Some 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, while the BBC has confirmed the names of almost 160,000 people killed fighting on Russia's side.
With the fourth anniversary of the Russia's full-scale invasion approaching, here's a look at the situation on the ground in Ukraine.
Russia grinds forward in the east
Analysts at the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), say Russia took about 4,700 sq km (1,800 sq miles) of territory in 2025 - an area about twice the size of the city of Moscow - although Russia claims to have taken 6,000 sq km.
In eastern Ukraine, Moscow's war machine has been churning mile by mile through the wide open fields of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions - also known as the Donbas - surrounding and overwhelming villages and towns.
It has been trying to gain full control of the area along with two more regions to the west - Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Shortly after the invasion, Russia held referendums to try to annexe all these regions - in the same way it had annexed Crimea in 2014 - but it has never had them under full control
Thu, February 19, 2026
[BBC]
The war in Ukraine is about to enter its fifth year. Over the past year, Russian forces have slowly expanded the amount of territory they control, mostly in the east of Ukraine, and have continued their barrage of air strikes on Kyiv and other cities.
Some 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, while the BBC has confirmed the names of almost 160,000 people killed fighting on Russia's side.
With the fourth anniversary of the Russia's full-scale invasion approaching, here's a look at the situation on the ground in Ukraine.
Russia grinds forward in the east
Analysts at the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), say Russia took about 4,700 sq km (1,800 sq miles) of territory in 2025 - an area about twice the size of the city of Moscow - although Russia claims to have taken 6,000 sq km.
In eastern Ukraine, Moscow's war machine has been churning mile by mile through the wide open fields of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions - also known as the Donbas - surrounding and overwhelming villages and towns.
It has been trying to gain full control of the area along with two more regions to the west - Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Shortly after the invasion, Russia held referendums to try to annexe all these regions - in the same way it had annexed Crimea in 2014 - but it has never had them under full control
[BBC]
There is some evidence that Elon Musk's decision to deny Russian forces access to his Starlink satellite-based internet service at the start of February has given Ukraine an advantage.
In some areas of the long front line, especially east of the city of Zaporizhzhia, Russian forces appear to have been forced to retreat.
Ukraine requested the move as evidence grew that Starlink was enabling Russian forces to mount increasingly accurate attacks, including multiple instances of units being attached to drones, allowing operators to use real-time video links to guide drones on to targets.
Ukraine hopes that any territorial gains will strengthen the its position at the negotiating table.
It comes after a US-backed peace plan unveiled in November, suggested Ukraine could cede control of all of Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea, along with the areas of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson that Russia currently occupies, to Moscow.
Ukrainian forces would have had to withdraw from parts of Donetsk they still hold and this would become a demilitarised area under de facto Russian control. Russian forces would withdraw from the small areas of Ukraine they currently occupy outside those regions.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has consistently said Ukraine will not hand over the Donbas in exchange for peace, saying such a concession could be used as a springboard for future attacks by Russia.
Key towns targeted
A recent report by the ISW describes a "fortress belt" running 50km (31 miles) through western Donetsk.
"Ukraine has spent the last 11 years pouring time, money, and effort into reinforcing the fortress belt and establishing significant defence industrial and defensive infrastructure," it writes.
A Russian summer offensive near the eastern town of Pokrovsk did make rapid advances just north of the town and Russia has recently made advances in the town itself and to the east of nearby Kostyantynivka.
The town, once a key logistics hub for Ukraine's military, is already in ruins.
[BBC]
Russian officials previously claimed to have captured Pokrovsk, known in Russian as Krasnoarmeysk, which includes a major road and railway junction that used to connect the upper parts of the Donetsk region with key cities to the west, such as Dnipro.
But Ukraine says it still holds northern parts of the town, which could give Moscow a platform to drive north towards the two biggest remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in the Donetsk region, Kramatorsk and Slovyansk.
Its fall would be Russia's biggest battlefield victory since it took the city of Avdiivka about 40km (25 miles) to the east in early 2024.
Ukraine is losing ground, but the ISW notes Russia has been trying to take Pokrovsk - a town of about 23 sq km - for nearly two years and that cities in the fortress belt are "significantly larger".
It suggests that it would take Russian forces another two years to seize the remainder of the Donetsk region "at great cost".
Why Donetsk 'fortress belt' matters so much for Ukraine's defences
Four key takeaways from Ukraine talks in Washington
Why did Putin's Russia invade Ukraine?
Russian incursion north of Kharkiv
Further north on the main front line, Russia has been trying to advance on the city of Kupyansk, which analysts suggest could allow it to encircle the northern Donetsk region.
It has also been trying to push Ukrainian forces back from the border with the Russian region of Belgorod.
[BBC]
ISW analysts say Russia is trying to create a buffer zone inside Ukraine's northern borders and get within artillery range of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-biggest city.
Russia's forces have recently gained limited control over a spear of land to the south of Vovchansk that would bring them closer to this target.
Russian President Vladimir Putin says he wants this buffer zone to protect Russia, after Ukrainian forces captured a swathe of territory further north in Kursk in the summer of 2024. Russian forces eventually drove them out, with the help of North Korean troops.
[BBC]
As well as the counter-offensive in the Kursk region, Ukraine has struck air bases deep inside Russia. One of these attacks involved using 100 drones to target nuclear-capable long-range bombers.
The Russian Defence Ministry confirmed the attacks had occurred in five regions of Russia - Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Ryazan and Amur - but stated planes had been damaged only in Murmansk and Irkutsk, while in other locations the attacks had been repelled.
More recently a massive attack by Ukrainian drones on Volzhsky, in the Volgograd region in Russia, was reported on 11 Febriuary.
Deep strikes are seen as a critical part of the war - Ukraine is trying to target Russia's war economy to slow the advances on the front line.
Russia has also been carrying out strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure - in particular its energy facilities such as electricity substations and power plants.
Several people have been killed in the attacks and tens of thousands of people across Ukraine have experienced severe power cuts or been left with no running water or heating during some of the coldest months of the winter.
Ceasefire talks
The attacks were paused for a week following a request from US President Donald Trump to Putin.
Trump has been leading efforts to end the war through negotiations, and Zelensky said this month that the US wanted the war to end by June.
However, the most recent round of talks between Russia, Ukraine and the US in Geneva, Switzerland, concluded without a breakthrough on 18 February.
Some progress was made on "military issues", including the location of the front line and ceasefire monitoring, according to a Ukrainian diplomatic source.
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said later that "there was meaningful progress" made on both sides, and an agreement to "continue to work towards a peace deal together".
But an agreement on the issue of territory - without which no ceasefire can be envisaged - remains elusive, with Moscow and Kyiv's positions still far apart.
Three years of fighting
Russia's full-scale invasion began with dozens of missile strikes on cities all over Ukraine before dawn on 24 February 2022.
Russian ground troops moved in quickly and within a few weeks were in control of large areas of Ukraine and had advanced to the suburbs of Kyiv.
Russian forces were bombarding Kharkiv, and had taken territory in the east and south as far as Kherson, and surrounded the port city of Mariupol.
[BBC]
But they hit very strong Ukrainian resistance almost everywhere and faced serious logistical problems with poorly-motivated Russian troops suffering shortages of food, water and ammunition.
Ukrainian forces were also quick to deploy Western supplied arms such as the Nlaw anti-tank system, which proved highly effective against the Russian advance.
By October 2022, the picture had changed dramatically and, having failed to take Kyiv, Russia withdrew completely from the north. The following month, Ukrainian forces recaptured the southern city of Kherson.
Since then, the battle has mostly been in the east of Ukraine with Russian forces slowly gaining ground over many months.
Both Kyiv and Moscow have regularly published estimates of the other side's losses but they have been reluctant to detail their own.
As of six months ago, Ukraine's interior ministry had recorded more than 70,000 people as officially missing - both soldiers and civilians - but the breakdown is never given and the true figure may be higher. However, Zelensky said at the start of February that 55,000 soldiers had been killed.
By Dominic Bailey, Mike Hills, Paul Sargeant, Chris Clayton, Kady Wardell, Camilla Costa, Mark Bryson, Sana Dionysiou, Gerry Fletcher, Kate Gaynor and Erwan Rivault
About these maps
To indicate which parts of Ukraine are under control by Russian troops we are using daily assessments published by the Institute for the Study of War with the American Enterprise Institute's Critical Threats Project.
The situation in Ukraine is often fast moving and it is likely there will be times when there have been changes not reflected in the maps.
Life is harsh and dangerous in Russian-run parts of Ukraine, activists and former residents say
YURAS KARMANAU
Thu, February 19, 2026
Civilians gather to receive drinking water distributed by the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry in Mariupol on May 27, 2022, after the seaside city in eastern Ukraine fell to Moscow's troops. (AP Photo, File)(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
A woman gets drinking water distributed by authorities in the city of Donetsk in the Russian-controlled part of eastern Ukraine, on Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026. (AP Photo)(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
A view inside Mariupol's Drama Theater on Monday, April 4, 2022, after the landmark was heavily damaged during fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces that led to Moscow's takeover of the seaside city. (AP Photo, File)(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Even now, safely in her new home of Estonia, Inna Vnukova says she can’t purge the terrifying memory of living under Russian occupation in eastern Ukraine early in the war and her family’s harrowing escape.
They hid in a damp basement for days in their village of Kudriashivka after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. In the streets, soldiers waving machine guns bullied residents, set up checkpoints and looted homes. There was constant shelling.
“Everyone was very scared and afraid to go outside,” Vnukova told The Associated Press, with troops seeking out Ukrainian sympathizers and civil servants like her and her husband, Oleksii Vnukov.
In mid-March, she decided that she and her 16-year-old son, Zhenya, would flee the village with her brother's family, even though it meant leaving her husband behind temporarily. They took a risky trip by car to nearby Starobilsk, waving a white sheet amid mortar fire.
“We had already said our goodbyes to life, cursing this Russian world,” said Vnukova, 42. “I’ve been trying to forget this nightmare for four years, but I can’t.”
Many Ukrainians like Vnukova fled the invading forces. Those who stayed risked being detained — or worse — as Russian forces eventually took control of about 20% of the country and its estimated 3 million to 5 million people.
A new, Russian life in the seized regions
After four years of war, life in shattered cities like Mariupol and villages like Kudriashivka remains difficult, with residents facing problems with housing, water, power, heat and health care. Even President Vladimir Putin has acknowledged they have “many truly pressing, urgent problems."
In the illegally annexed regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, Russian citizenship, language and culture is forced on residents, including in school lessons and textbooks. By spring 2025, some 3.5 million people in the four regions had been given Russian passports — a requirement to receive vital services like health care.
Some in the regions say they live in fear of being accused of sympathizing with Ukraine. Many have been imprisoned, beaten and killed, according to human rights activists.
Oleksii Vnukov, a court security officer, stayed behind in the village for nearly two weeks. Russian soldiers twice threatened to kill him, including an instance where he and a friend were dragged off the street by soldiers. But he survived and soon also escaped the village.
The family traveled through Russia before making it to Estonia, where Inna works in a printing house and Oleksii, 43, is an electrician.
“All life is leaving the occupied territories,” Vnukov said. “The people there aren’t living, they’re just surviving.”
Canadians Trash Trump’s America as a Bigger Threat Than Russia
The Daily Beast
Mykhailo Savva of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine said the Russian military's practice of wielding “systemic and total control” in the regions continues today.
“Even though a significant number of socially active people have already been detained, Russian special services continue to identify disloyal Ukrainians, extract confessions, and continue to detain people,” Savva said. “Residents face such practices as document checks, mass searches, and denunciations on a daily basis.”
Human rights groups say Russian authorities used “filtration camps” to identify potentially disloyal individuals, as well as anyone who worked for the government, helped the Ukrainian army or had relatives in the military, along with journalists, teachers, scientists and politicians.
Stanislav Shkuta, 25, who lived in occupied Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson region, said he narrowly escaped arrest several times before reaching Ukrainian-controlled territory in 2023. He recalled being on a bus that was stopped by Russian soldiers.
“It was horrific. Men and women were asked to strip to the waist to see if they had Ukrainian tattoos,” said Shkuta, who now lives in Estonia. “I turned white with fear, wondering if I’d cleared everything on my phone.”
He said his friends who stayed in Nova Kakhovka say life has worsened, with suspected Ukrainian sympathizers stopped on the street or in surprise door-to-door inspections.
“Today, my friends complain that life there has become impossible,” he said.
Russia established a “vast network of secret and official detention centers where tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians” are held indefinitely without charge, said Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Center for Civil Liberties.
“Everyone knows that if you end up in the basement, your life is worth nothing,” she said.
Russian officials have refused to comment on past allegations by U.N. human rights officials that it tortures civilians and prisoners of war.
About 16,000 civilians have been detained illegally, but that number could be much higher because many are held incommunicado. said Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets.
A U.N. report released last summer said that between July 2024 and June 2025, it spoke to 57 civilians who were detained in the occupied regions, and that 52 of them told of severe beatings, electric shocks, sexual violence, degradation and threats of violence.
One particularly famous case is that of Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna, 27, who disappeared in 2023 while reporting near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and died in Russian custody. When her body was handed over to Ukraine in 2025, it bore signs of torture, with some of her organs removed, a prosecutor said.
“Russia uses terror in the occupied territories to physically eliminate active people working in certain fields: teachers, children’s writers, musicians, mayors, journalists, environmentalists. It also intimidates the passive majority,” Matviichuk says.
Destruction in Mariupol
At the start of the war, Russian forces besieged Mariupol before the port city fell in May 2022. The Russian bombing of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater on March 16 of that year killed close to 600 people in and around the building, an AP investigation found, in the single deadliest known attack against civilians in the war.
Most of the city's population of about a half-million fled but many hid in basements, said a former actor who huddled for months with his parents, saying they were nearly killed by the Russian bombing.
The former actor, now in Estonia, spoke on condition of anonymity to not endanger his 76-year-old parents, still in Mariupol. They had to take Russian citizenship to get medical care, as well as a one-time payment equivalent to $1,300 per person as compensation for their destroyed home, he said.
As in other occupied cities, Russification is taking place in Mariupol, changing street names, teaching Moscow-approved curriculum in schools, using Russian phone and TV networks and putting the city in Moscow's time zone.
“But even today, the threat of death has not gone away. Only those who have 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 states that there is no Ukrainian language, no Ukrainian culture, no Ukrainian nation. And in the occupied territories, these words are turning into terrible practice,” Matviichuk said.
But not everyone opposes the Russian takeover in Mariupol. The former actor says half of the members of his old troupe now support the Kremlin and believe Kyiv “provoked the war.”
Housing is a sore point in Mariupol, where the population is about half of what it was before 2022. New apartment blocks rose from the ruins, but rather than 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 ‘don’t abandon our own.’ Do we not count as your own?” said one resident at a mass rally.
At least 12,191 apartments in Mariupol were added to a list of purportedly “ownerless” and abandoned flats to be expropriated in the first half of 2025. Thousands more are being seized elsewhere.
Moscow is encouraging Russian citizens to move to the occupied regions, offering a range of benefits. Teachers, doctors and cultural workers are promised salary supplements if they commit to living there for five years.
Crumbling infrastructure and a shortage of doctors
Years of war and neglect have saddled many occupied cities in eastern Ukraine with serious problems in supplying heat, electricity and water.
The northeastern city of Sievierodonetsk suffered significant destruction before falling to Russia in June 2022. Once home to 140,000 people, only 45,000 remain, mostly elderly or disabled.
Only one ambulance crew serves the whole city, and doctors and other health workers rotate in from Russian regions like Perm to work at its hospital, said a 67-year-old former engineer who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
But she still supports “the great work Putin is doing,” because she was born and raised in the former Soviet Union.
In Alchevsk, a city in the Luhansk region, over half the homes have been without heat for two bitterly cold months. Five warming stations have been set up and utility companies said over 60% of municipal heating networks are in poor shape, without funds for repairs.
Even a pro-Moscow politician, Oleg Tsaryov, has accused authorities of freezing “an entire city.” When the heating system failed in 2006, he noted on social media that Ukrainian authorities "and the entire country stepped in to help and completely replaced the faulty equipment.” But after the Russian takeover, officials had “contrived to repeat this Armageddon scenario all over 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 she feared repercussions.
“There's constant squabbling over water,” she said, adding that lines to get the precious resource are “insane,” and people who are away at work often miss the trucks' arrival.
Donetsk residents wrote an appeal for Putin to intervene in what has become "a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe.”
Putin last year acknowledged the plight in the four regions.
“I know how difficult it is now for the residents of the liberated cities and towns. There are many truly pressing, urgent problems," he said, marking the third anniversary of incorporating those areas into Russia. He cited the need for reliable water supplies and access to health care, among other issues, and said he has launched a "large-scale socioeconomic development program” for the regions.
Meanwhile, Inna Vnukova is building a new life in Estonia: She and Oleksii now have a 1-year-old daughter, Alisa. Their son is now 20.
Only about 150 people — including the couple's parents — remain in the village that once was home to 800, Vnukova said, adding that she would like to show her daughter the family's native Luhansk region someday.
“We’ve been dreaming of returning for four years, but we increasingly wonder — what will we see there?” she asked.
—-
Thu, February 19, 2026
Civilians gather to receive drinking water distributed by the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry in Mariupol on May 27, 2022, after the seaside city in eastern Ukraine fell to Moscow's troops. (AP Photo, File)(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
A woman gets drinking water distributed by authorities in the city of Donetsk in the Russian-controlled part of eastern Ukraine, on Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026. (AP Photo)(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
A view inside Mariupol's Drama Theater on Monday, April 4, 2022, after the landmark was heavily damaged during fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces that led to Moscow's takeover of the seaside city. (AP Photo, File)(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Even now, safely in her new home of Estonia, Inna Vnukova says she can’t purge the terrifying memory of living under Russian occupation in eastern Ukraine early in the war and her family’s harrowing escape.
They hid in a damp basement for days in their village of Kudriashivka after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. In the streets, soldiers waving machine guns bullied residents, set up checkpoints and looted homes. There was constant shelling.
“Everyone was very scared and afraid to go outside,” Vnukova told The Associated Press, with troops seeking out Ukrainian sympathizers and civil servants like her and her husband, Oleksii Vnukov.
In mid-March, she decided that she and her 16-year-old son, Zhenya, would flee the village with her brother's family, even though it meant leaving her husband behind temporarily. They took a risky trip by car to nearby Starobilsk, waving a white sheet amid mortar fire.
“We had already said our goodbyes to life, cursing this Russian world,” said Vnukova, 42. “I’ve been trying to forget this nightmare for four years, but I can’t.”
Many Ukrainians like Vnukova fled the invading forces. Those who stayed risked being detained — or worse — as Russian forces eventually took control of about 20% of the country and its estimated 3 million to 5 million people.
A new, Russian life in the seized regions
After four years of war, life in shattered cities like Mariupol and villages like Kudriashivka remains difficult, with residents facing problems with housing, water, power, heat and health care. Even President Vladimir Putin has acknowledged they have “many truly pressing, urgent problems."
In the illegally annexed regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, Russian citizenship, language and culture is forced on residents, including in school lessons and textbooks. By spring 2025, some 3.5 million people in the four regions had been given Russian passports — a requirement to receive vital services like health care.
Some in the regions say they live in fear of being accused of sympathizing with Ukraine. Many have been imprisoned, beaten and killed, according to human rights activists.
Oleksii Vnukov, a court security officer, stayed behind in the village for nearly two weeks. Russian soldiers twice threatened to kill him, including an instance where he and a friend were dragged off the street by soldiers. But he survived and soon also escaped the village.
The family traveled through Russia before making it to Estonia, where Inna works in a printing house and Oleksii, 43, is an electrician.
“All life is leaving the occupied territories,” Vnukov said. “The people there aren’t living, they’re just surviving.”
Canadians Trash Trump’s America as a Bigger Threat Than Russia
The Daily BeastMykhailo Savva of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine said the Russian military's practice of wielding “systemic and total control” in the regions continues today.
“Even though a significant number of socially active people have already been detained, Russian special services continue to identify disloyal Ukrainians, extract confessions, and continue to detain people,” Savva said. “Residents face such practices as document checks, mass searches, and denunciations on a daily basis.”
Human rights groups say Russian authorities used “filtration camps” to identify potentially disloyal individuals, as well as anyone who worked for the government, helped the Ukrainian army or had relatives in the military, along with journalists, teachers, scientists and politicians.
Stanislav Shkuta, 25, who lived in occupied Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson region, said he narrowly escaped arrest several times before reaching Ukrainian-controlled territory in 2023. He recalled being on a bus that was stopped by Russian soldiers.
“It was horrific. Men and women were asked to strip to the waist to see if they had Ukrainian tattoos,” said Shkuta, who now lives in Estonia. “I turned white with fear, wondering if I’d cleared everything on my phone.”
He said his friends who stayed in Nova Kakhovka say life has worsened, with suspected Ukrainian sympathizers stopped on the street or in surprise door-to-door inspections.
“Today, my friends complain that life there has become impossible,” he said.
Russia established a “vast network of secret and official detention centers where tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians” are held indefinitely without charge, said Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Center for Civil Liberties.
“Everyone knows that if you end up in the basement, your life is worth nothing,” she said.
Russian officials have refused to comment on past allegations by U.N. human rights officials that it tortures civilians and prisoners of war.
About 16,000 civilians have been detained illegally, but that number could be much higher because many are held incommunicado. said Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets.
A U.N. report released last summer said that between July 2024 and June 2025, it spoke to 57 civilians who were detained in the occupied regions, and that 52 of them told of severe beatings, electric shocks, sexual violence, degradation and threats of violence.
One particularly famous case is that of Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna, 27, who disappeared in 2023 while reporting near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and died in Russian custody. When her body was handed over to Ukraine in 2025, it bore signs of torture, with some of her organs removed, a prosecutor said.
“Russia uses terror in the occupied territories to physically eliminate active people working in certain fields: teachers, children’s writers, musicians, mayors, journalists, environmentalists. It also intimidates the passive majority,” Matviichuk says.
Destruction in Mariupol
At the start of the war, Russian forces besieged Mariupol before the port city fell in May 2022. The Russian bombing of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater on March 16 of that year killed close to 600 people in and around the building, an AP investigation found, in the single deadliest known attack against civilians in the war.
Most of the city's population of about a half-million fled but many hid in basements, said a former actor who huddled for months with his parents, saying they were nearly killed by the Russian bombing.
The former actor, now in Estonia, spoke on condition of anonymity to not endanger his 76-year-old parents, still in Mariupol. They had to take Russian citizenship to get medical care, as well as a one-time payment equivalent to $1,300 per person as compensation for their destroyed home, he said.
As in other occupied cities, Russification is taking place in Mariupol, changing street names, teaching Moscow-approved curriculum in schools, using Russian phone and TV networks and putting the city in Moscow's time zone.
“But even today, the threat of death has not gone away. Only those who have 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 states that there is no Ukrainian language, no Ukrainian culture, no Ukrainian nation. And in the occupied territories, these words are turning into terrible practice,” Matviichuk said.
But not everyone opposes the Russian takeover in Mariupol. The former actor says half of the members of his old troupe now support the Kremlin and believe Kyiv “provoked the war.”
Housing is a sore point in Mariupol, where the population is about half of what it was before 2022. New apartment blocks rose from the ruins, but rather than 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 ‘don’t abandon our own.’ Do we not count as your own?” said one resident at a mass rally.
At least 12,191 apartments in Mariupol were added to a list of purportedly “ownerless” and abandoned flats to be expropriated in the first half of 2025. Thousands more are being seized elsewhere.
Moscow is encouraging Russian citizens to move to the occupied regions, offering a range of benefits. Teachers, doctors and cultural workers are promised salary supplements if they commit to living there for five years.
Crumbling infrastructure and a shortage of doctors
Years of war and neglect have saddled many occupied cities in eastern Ukraine with serious problems in supplying heat, electricity and water.
The northeastern city of Sievierodonetsk suffered significant destruction before falling to Russia in June 2022. Once home to 140,000 people, only 45,000 remain, mostly elderly or disabled.
Only one ambulance crew serves the whole city, and doctors and other health workers rotate in from Russian regions like Perm to work at its hospital, said a 67-year-old former engineer who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
But she still supports “the great work Putin is doing,” because she was born and raised in the former Soviet Union.
In Alchevsk, a city in the Luhansk region, over half the homes have been without heat for two bitterly cold months. Five warming stations have been set up and utility companies said over 60% of municipal heating networks are in poor shape, without funds for repairs.
Even a pro-Moscow politician, Oleg Tsaryov, has accused authorities of freezing “an entire city.” When the heating system failed in 2006, he noted on social media that Ukrainian authorities "and the entire country stepped in to help and completely replaced the faulty equipment.” But after the Russian takeover, officials had “contrived to repeat this Armageddon scenario all over 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 she feared repercussions.
“There's constant squabbling over water,” she said, adding that lines to get the precious resource are “insane,” and people who are away at work often miss the trucks' arrival.
Donetsk residents wrote an appeal for Putin to intervene in what has become "a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe.”
Putin last year acknowledged the plight in the four regions.
“I know how difficult it is now for the residents of the liberated cities and towns. There are many truly pressing, urgent problems," he said, marking the third anniversary of incorporating those areas into Russia. He cited the need for reliable water supplies and access to health care, among other issues, and said he has launched a "large-scale socioeconomic development program” for the regions.
Meanwhile, Inna Vnukova is building a new life in Estonia: She and Oleksii now have a 1-year-old daughter, Alisa. Their son is now 20.
Only about 150 people — including the couple's parents — remain in the village that once was home to 800, Vnukova said, adding that she would like to show her daughter the family's native Luhansk region someday.
“We’ve been dreaming of returning for four years, but we increasingly wonder — what will we see there?” she asked.
—-
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