This week’s update from the Kyiv Independent offers a glimpse into the strange, brutal reality experienced by Ukrainians living under Russian occupation, where even language and memory are being weaponized. In the occupied front-line town of Oleshky, in Kherson Oblast, Russia is preparing a carefully staged disinformation operation. Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU, said on Oct. 7 that Russian forces ordered one of their units to produce a series of videos featuring local residents, scheduled for release in October and early November. The interviews are not meant to show the truth. According to the SBU, they are intended to blame Ukrainian forces for air attacks and for blockading Oleshky, to discredit Ukraine’s leadership, and to portray Russian troops as saviors. The SBU called it an attempt to undermine the psychological and emotional well-being of Ukrainians and destabilize the country from within, especially as Russia fails to achieve its military objectives. What makes this plan especially cruel is the setting. Oleshky has been under occupation since the very first days of the full-scale invasion. Around 2,000 people, including nearly 50 children, remain in the town, living with severe shortages of food, water, and electricity. The roads around them are mined. Russian drones are constantly in the sky. At checkpoints, Russian soldiers interrogate residents, and safe evacuation is almost impossible. On the other side of the Dnipro River, Ukraine controls the western bank, including the city of Kherson, and Russian troops use towns like Oleshky as staging grounds for attacks across the water. International humanitarian organizations are blocked from entering. In September, only 12 people managed to escape Oleshky to Ukrainian-controlled territory. For the people still there, Russian propaganda interviews are just another form of captivity. Their suffering is being filmed, edited, and turned into a weapon against them. The disinformation campaign is not a sideshow; it is part of the same assault that has already made daily life in Oleshky a survival test.
At the same time, the Kremlin is preparing for what it hopes will be a very long presence in the captured regions. Russia’s new three-year federal budget, submitted to the State Duma on Sept. 30, keeps more than 865 billion rubles, roughly 10 billion dollars, available for a state program dedicated to the occupation of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts. The draft budget, reported by the Russian news agency Prime and echoed by the Russian-installed administration in Kherson Oblast, allocates 293.8 billion rubles for 2027, 290.1 billion for 2028, and 281.7 billion for 2029. Moscow says the funds are meant to rebuild infrastructure and support socioeconomic development in what it calls the “new regions.” The state program was created specifically to manage reconstruction and development under Russian control. But the Institute for the Study of War drew a more disturbing conclusion on Oct. 8: the relatively stable budget allocations suggest that Russia views investment in the occupation as a “lucrative and necessary federal priority,” because it facilitates the forced integration of occupied territories into Russia. Budget lines are easy to read as abstract numbers, but they translate directly into daily life. This money pays for Russian schools that erase Ukrainian history, for Russian courts that sentence prisoners of conscience, for bureaucrats who seize apartments and re-register property, for passport offices, police stations, and military recruiters. It is money spent not to heal the region, but to remake it. The people who actually live in the occupied territories have no voice in how it is spent; they are treated as subjects of a foreign state that has decided, without their consent, what their future will look like. This budget is perhaps the clearest official signal that Russia intends to stay, and that its occupation is not a temporary military accident but a deliberate, funded project. The fact that Moscow is planning budgets through 2029, even as its military struggles, tells us that the occupation is meant to become a permanent reality.
Amid these political and economic maneuvers, the war remains a brutal, physical contest. Between Oct. 4 and Oct. 8, Ukraine’s military carried out a coordinated wave of strikes against Russian military infrastructure inside occupied territories, according to reports from Ukraine’s General Staff. The targets included drone launch and storage sites, command posts, communications infrastructure, and supply depots across Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts. In Donetsk Oblast, Ukrainian forces hit a site near the regional capital where Russian troops stored, prepared, and launched attack drones, along with a telecommunications hub, command and observation posts, and military supply depots. Russian troop concentrations near Burlatske were also targeted. In Luhansk Oblast, strikes hit Russian command posts near Prydorozhnie, a drone depot near Siverskodonetsk, an ammunition depot near Khrustalnyi, and storage sites for fuel and lubricants. In Zaporizhzhia Oblast, the targets included command posts near Bilotserkivka and Kamianka, a drone depot and command post near Berdiansk, and a military repair unit. In Kherson Oblast, Ukrainian forces struck a Russian command post near Shchaslyvtseve. These operations reflect the uncomfortable truth that the occupied territories are not passive rear areas. They have been turned into dense military bases, packed with weapons, equipment, and personnel used to attack Ukrainian cities and villages every day. By striking these targets, Ukraine is trying to dismantle the machinery of war before it can be used. But the same strikes also carry risks for the civilians still trapped in those areas, who are used by Russian forces as human shields and who cannot simply move out of the way. Every explosion in the occupied south and east is felt by people who have already endured years of occupation and displacement. The battlefield is not only along the trenches; it is everywhere Russian troops have drawn a gun on civilian life. No occupied city is truly behind the lines; every one of them is a firing position.
The occupation is also being fought against the very idea of home. In Siverskodonetsk, in Luhansk Oblast, Russian occupation authorities have issued notices to residents of two apartment buildings, ordering them to remove their belongings before demolition. One building, at 30 Soviet Avenue, must be cleared by Oct. 15. The other, at 17 Budivelnykiv Highway, has a deadline of Oct. 20. Both buildings were damaged during fighting, and both have been included in the occupation authorities’ demolition program. This might be dismissed as a matter of clearing unsafe structures, but the evidence points to something more systematic. A September investigation by the Ukrainian human rights organization ZMINA found that building demolitions in Siverskodonetsk have surged. Earlier in the occupation, only a few high-rise buildings had been demolished. Over the summer, at least 79 buildings were added to the demolition plan. Similar patterns have emerged across occupied Ukraine, especially in Mariupol, where residential buildings are frequently declared unsafe and slated for demolition without transparent assessments. The human consequence is immense. For displaced residents, a building marked for demolition means they may return to find that their home no longer exists, and that their legal claim to it has been erased. Occupied authorities can also declare a property “ownerless” if residents fail to meet their requirements, allowing the administration to seize control without compensation. Families already scattered across Ukraine and abroad are thus stripped of their remaining anchor. For those who stay, demolition orders turn daily life into a countdown. The destruction is not random; it is a tool of redevelopment and control. Each demolished building helps reshape an occupied city according to Russian plans and removes physical traces of Ukrainian community life. Behind the official language of urban renewal lies a quieter and more deliberate erasure. For people who have survived shelling and occupation, a demolition order is another kind of wound, one that says the past they built is being taken away too.
Elsewhere in the occupied territories, the occupation authorities continue to pursue a relentless campaign against the elderly. Human rights activists from the Crimean Tatar Resource Center released a report on Oct. 8 documenting at least 64 people over the age of 60 who have been subjected to political persecution in Russian-occupied Crimea. Of those, 49 are men and 15 are women. Forty-four have already been sentenced to prison, while 20 are still being held in pre-trial detention. The charges brought against them are familiar to anyone who has followed Russia’s occupation policies: alleged treason, espionage, sabotage, and suspected ties to religious or political organizations banned in Russia. Some have been accused of financing Ukraine’s military or supporting the Noman Celebicihan Crimean Tatar volunteer battalion. These are not serious threats to Russian security; they are ordinary people, many of whom are simply too old to flee or resist the coercion around them. The oldest man in the group is 77-year-old Volodymyr Ananiev, and Russian prosecutors are asking a court to sentence him to 22 years in prison. The oldest woman is 71-year-old Halyna Dovhopola. Their age makes the cruelty of the cases impossible to ignore. This is not a justice system; it is a machinery of intimidation. The Kyiv Independent’s own September investigation showed how Russia has turned the political persecution apparatus it built in Crimea after 2014 into a hub for illegally detaining Ukrainian civilians, especially from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, after the full-scale invasion. Elderly prisoners are often in poor health, cut off from medicine, family, and legal help, making them easier targets. By documenting their names and stories, activists are trying to pierce the silence that surrounds Russian prisons. Each case is a reminder that the occupation is not just about controlling land. It is about breaking people, regardless of their age or vulnerability.
The most hopeful and heartbreaking news this week concerns children. On Oct. 7, Ukraine’s human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, announced that a teenager detained by Russian forces for pro-Ukrainian views and suspected of “terrorism” had been evacuated from occupied territory. Lubinets did not say where or when the rescue took place, but he explained that the teenager was brought out through the Volyn humanitarian corridor, a crossing point at the Belarusian border that has operated since 2025 as part of negotiations with Russia, while most other borders remain closed. This young person was not alone. Over the past week, Ukraine also brought 25 children and teenagers from occupied areas back to Ukrainian-controlled territory, according to Save Ukraine, the Ukrainian humanitarian organization that reported the operation on Oct. 2. These returns are extraordinary acts of care and coordination, but they also reveal the scale of what remains to be done. Lubinets has said that around 1.6 million Ukrainian children may still be living in occupied territories. There, they are issued Russian documents, placed in Russian foster families, subjected to constant propaganda, and stripped of their Ukrainian identity. Russian schools force them into military training, and thousands of young Ukrainians are being conscripted into the Russian army. Lubinets put it bluntly: “The Russian leadership has a single aim: to continue the war against Ukraine using others’ hands. To train a new generation of soldiers.” Against this vast machinery, each individual rescue is a small but essential victory. The teenager who was suspected of “terrorism” for loving his country is now safe. The 25 children brought home are beginning the slow work of healing, reconnecting with language, family, and identity. They are proof that Ukraine’s responsibility does not end at the front line. It reaches into occupied villages and cities, through dangerous corridors, across closed borders, to bring its people home. Each return is a small act of defiance against a system that treats children as raw material. The work goes on, and for the children still waiting, every corridor matters.