A few weeks ago, Russian authorities returned to Ukraine the body of Yevhen Matveyev, mayor of Dniprorudne, a Russian-occupied town. He was captured after President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Russians offered no explanation of Matveyev’s death. In September, Viktoria Roshchyna, a Ukrainian journalist who bravely reported on conditions in Russian-held areas, died in captivity. She was 27.
The longer Putin’s war of aggression has gone on, the less often such stories make the headlines. We hear a lot about Russian military advances in eastern Ukraine, less about what is happening to people in the occupied areas. But if, as seems possible, Ukraine agrees to a ceasefire next year on the west’s advice, it is as certain as night follows day that ruthless repression and Russification will continue in the roughly 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory expected to remain in Russian hands.
A growing war weariness in Ukraine and the desire of some western governments to end the fighting may enable Putin to retain de facto, though not legal, control of his conquests. But if so, the west will need a strong stomach for what will come next. To judge from Russia’s actions over the past three years — and longer in the case of Crimea, annexed in 2014 — the occupied areas will suffer a fate like that of western Ukraine and the Baltic states, seized by Joseph Stalin in the second world war and incorporated into the USSR.