At the same time, Russia is publicly vowing to make life for the residents of the regions it controls better. At a government meeting on June 30, Putin said<\/strong><\/a> living standards in the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine should reach the average level for Russia by 2030.<\/p>\n No way, Ukrainian activists and officials from those regions say.<\/p>\n Putin\u2019s goal may be modest but it\u2019s just not realistic, they argue, citing high hurdles put up by the invading country itself. And they point to the experience of Crimea, where living standards still lag more than 11 years after Russia seized control of the Black Sea peninsula without any of the destruction it has inflicted on mainland Ukraine.<\/p>\n A construction crew works on what remains of a building in Russian-occupied Mariupol, Ukraine, August 16, 2023.<\/p>\n At the meeting last month, Putin spoke of the need to rebuild or renovate schools, stadiums, hospitals, cultural centers, roads, housing, and more, and said that \u201crhythmic, systematic work\u201d was proceeding on some 300 projects within the development program.<\/p>\n There\u2019s little evidence of that on the ground in the Russian-occupied part of the Kherson region, according to Serhiy Rybalko, a lawmaker in the regional legislature based in the city of Kherson, which was captured by Russian forces early in the invasion but retaken by Ukraine<\/strong><\/a> in a counteroffensive later in 2022.<\/p>\n Russia holds most of the land on the left bank of the Dnieper River, which bisects the region, while Ukraine holds the right bank.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no restoration, no construction of schools or anything else,\u201d Rybalko told RFE\/RL.<\/p>\n He said the prospects for successful development by the Russian occupiers are not promising, for several reasons, not least of which is the destruction of the massive Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper by an explosion<\/strong><\/a> in 2023 that Ukraine blames on Russia.<\/p>\n \u201cKherson is an agricultural region\u201d and agriculture is currently in \u201ccomplete decline\u201d there, Rybalko said, adding that the destruction of the dam and the lack of irrigation has severely hampered livestock farming and vegetable growing. \u201cThere is no irrigation – this means that this region is very quickly turning into a desert.\u201d<\/p>\n Many farmers leasing land in the Russian-occupied part of the region have been unable to pay for their leases for 2024 and may be unable to do so again this year, he added: \u201cSo, nobody will work, no taxes will be paid, and there will be no development of this territory.\u201d<\/p>\n Another barrier to economic revival in the region is the Russian governments tendency to favor state companies and top-down economic efforts over nurturing small and medium-sized business that have been mainstays of the Kherson region in the past, Rybalko said.<\/p>\n \u201cPutin is afraid of the development of the middle class. He fears people who can think for themselves,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Ukrainians — particularly younger people — are continuing to leave the Russian-occupied left bank lands and \u201cnobody is coming from Russia to replace them, everybody\u2019s afraid,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The Kakhovka dam was destroyed by an explosion in June 2023<\/p>\n \u201cNo normal person will come to an area where military actions are essentially taking place,\u201d he said, and where — though it looks unlikely to happen any time soon — Ukraine may eventually regain control.<\/p>\n Zaporizhzhya, which lies between Kherson and the Donbas, is another region that is partially Russian-occupied, but Ukraine continues to hold the capital. Its southern reaches, on the Azov Sea coast, are crucial to a Russian-held \u201cland corridor\u201d linking Russia with Crimea, which are otherwise connected only by a bridge that has been attacked by Ukraine several times.<\/p>\n At the June 30 meeting, Putin repeated his claim that the Azov Sea is now an \u201cinternal Russia sea\u201d because Russia currently controls all the land that surrounds it and said that 5,400 kilometers of roads forming a ring around it have been renovated.<\/p>\n Andriy Orlov, the director of the Center for the Strategic Development of Territory, a think tank originally based in Melitopol, a Russian-occupied city in the Zaporizhzhya region, said that numbers may be exaggerated and that most of the road improvement has been done in Russia itself or in Crimea, not in the more recently occupied areas.<\/p>\n Orlov said that Putin\u2019s pronouncements were aimed to assure residents that Russia will \u201ccreate a good life\u201d for them, but that official reports from the occupation authorities make it \u201cclear that there are very big problems\u201d — rampant corruption and a \u201cglaring personnel deficit\u201d among them, he charged.<\/p>\n Like the other Ukrainians RFE\/RL spoke to for this story, he is currently based in Ukrainian-controlled territory. Several claims by Russian and Ukrainian officials could not be independently verified due to a lack of access to the Russian-occupied territories.<\/p>\n Corruption and personnel shortages are also problems in Mariupol<\/strong><\/a>, the Azov Sea port in the Donetsk region that Russia seized in May 2022 after a long and deadly siege<\/strong><\/a> that left much of the city in ruins.<\/p>\n A medical diagnostic center has been fitted out with modern equipment \u201cbut there are not enough doctors — there\u2019s nobody there to do the diagnoses,\u201d Petro Andryushchenko, a former Mariupol mayoral adviser who now heads the Center for the Study of the Occupation, told RFE\/RL.<\/p>\n Renovation of a public swimming pool in Mariupol has been set back by the \u201ctheft of all the equipment\u201d that had remained intact after the \u201cultramodern\u201d facility was damaged during the siege, Andryushchenko said.<\/p>\n Housing is a major problem in Mariupol, a city of some 425,000 before the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, with many citizens living in apartment buildings that were damaged or destroyed during the siege.<\/p>\n \u201cThere were 2,500 [residential] buildings in total, 500 were demolished, what remains are ruins — almost all the housing that needs repair, and people still live there,\u201d Andryushchenko said. \u201cAnd there is also housing that people don\u2019t live in. The reconstruction of these buildings has been frozen.\u201d<\/p>\n Living Standards<\/strong><\/p>\n Ukrainians point to Crimea as an indicator of whether it Moscow will be able to bolster the economy and boost living standards in the swaths of mainland Ukraine it controls — assuming that Kyiv does not take them back through war or diplomacy in the coming years.<\/p>\n Russia \u201cearmarked a great deal of money for Crimea\u2026. The occupation authorities said that Crimea would get along without subsidies [from Moscow] after five years, then they said seven years,\u201d Yevhenia Horyunova, a political analyst from the peninsula, told RFE\/RL. \u201cBut Crimea remains a subsidized region\u201d whose economy \u201chas not become self-sufficient.\u201d<\/p>\n Furthermore, Horyunova said, the average wage in Crimea is substantially lower than the average in Russia. \u201cThat is, the standard of living has not improved — it has not become better than it was.\u201d<\/p>\n (Written by Steve Gutterman based on reporting by Olena Badiuk of News of Azov, a reporting project of RFE\/RL\u2019s Ukrainian Service focusing on southern Ukraine.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In one of his most bellicose and provocative remarks as Russia\u2019s war against Ukraine rages on, President Vladimir…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":257810,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7655],"tags":[126,332,6323,657],"class_list":{"0":"post-257809","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-russia","8":"tag-features","9":"tag-russia","10":"tag-russia-invades-ukraine","11":"tag-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114837974218535063","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/01000000-0aff-0242-62a4-08dc9a820bfc_w250_r1_s.jpg\"\/)
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