The chief aim is probably to change the ethnic makeup and instal people more likely than Ukrainians to be loyal to the Russian invaders
Having failed to convince Ukrainians that the Russian invaders are ‘liberators’, Russia is increasingly driving out Ukrainians from occupied territory and bringing in its own citizens.
IRC-South posted a photo in occupied Kherson oblast of one of the families of men who fought in what Russia continues to call its ‘special military operation’ [‘SVO’ from the Russian words], i.e. its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainian publication reports that Russia is, in brazen violation of international law, resettling on occupied Ukrainian territory families from the poorer parts of the Russian Federation. Russian propaganda media, for example, showed the family in the photo above, from Chuvashia. The father is described as a “military serviceman, an SVO veteran, serving in Kherson oblast. It is claimed that the family received a warm welcome in occupied Kherson oblast, with the ‘veteran’s’ wife working as a teacher of young children at the school where the three youngest children are enrolled.
The aim, IRC-South reports, is for such families in the future to form the basis for the Russian occupation authorities in the region. This was part of Russian policy of expansion over centuries and has been applied in occupied Crimea since 2014.
Such ‘resettlements’ are also used to facilitate Russia’s total distortion of the historical facts about its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and armed seizure of territory where the population were almost all Ukrainian. A propaganda piece from Komsomolskaya Pravda, for example, asserts that “Nine residents of Kherson heroically died for Russia in SVO, while a further seven are missing”. If men from occupied Kherson oblast were fighting Russia’s war against Ukraine, they must have been forcibly mobilized, with this on occupied territory a war crime. It is, in fact, likely that they were Russians, and the aggressor state is simply trying to rewrite the facts.
This is probably why Moscow has been even more aggressive in forcing Ukrainians on newly occupied territory to take Russian citizenship than was the case in 2014 in occupied Crimea. As well as denial of healthcare, social benefits, etc. and difficulty getting a job, the invaders also demanded that people’s homes and other property be ‘re-registered’ under Russian legislation, for which a person has to have a Russian passport. These are just a few of the methods used, with others including straight terror, with those refusing to take Russian citizenship likely to end up terrorized, abducted and / or ‘deported’ to government-controlled Ukrainian territory.
On 20 March 2025, Russian leader Vladimir Putin issued a decree essentially treating Ukrainians living on Ukrainian territory as ‘foreign nationals’ and giving them until 10 September to take Russian citizenship (“regulate their position”) or face deportation.
Worth noting that, although Russia uses such coercion to foist its citizenship on those physically present on occupied territory, they are making it very difficult for Ukrainians to return, with a huge percentage of those undergoing so-called ‘filtration’ at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow being refused. Russia is, at the same time, encouraging its own citizens to move to occupied territory, as part of its demographic aggression and policy of destroying Ukrainian identity of illegally occupied Ukrainian land.
Russia has also escalated its so-called ‘filtration’ measures to stop Ukrainians who left when Russia invaded from returning to their homes on occupied territory, even where this is to see a dying relative. Although the situation has now worsened, it has long been clear that one motive is to steal Ukrainians’ property by claiming it ‘ownerless’. (More details here)
On 28 May 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine issued a special report concerning Russia’s persistent done attacks on civilians in Kherson oblast. It presented evidence that such attacks are widespread, systematic and “conducted as part of a coordinated state policy” and concluded that these constitute crimes against humanity of murder.
The constant drone attacks on civilians and on civilian infrastructure were aimed at terrorizing the population, the Commission concluded, with the objective clearly to drive out the population. The Commission also noted that the drone operators use video feeds transmitted in real time by cameras embedded in the drones, with these focusing and dropping explosives on visibly civilian targets. These videos are then disseminated to Russian Telegram channels, some of them with thousands of subscribers, together with texts effectively telling civilians that they could be next.
“The recurrent drone attacks, the widely disseminated videos showing them, and numerous posts explicitly exhorting the population to leave suggest a coordinated state policy, on the part of the Russian authorities, to force the population of Kherson Province to leave the area. The Commission therefore concludes that Russian armed forces may have committed the crime against humanity of forcible transfer of population.”