Russian-run areas of Ukraine face water, heat and housing woes

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Nearly four years into its full-scale invasion, Russia controls about 20% of Ukrainian territory. Many of the estimated 3 million to 5 million people who remain in regions under Moscow's control face housing, water, power, heat and health care woes.

Even President Vladimir Putin has acknowledged “many truly pressing, urgent problems” in the regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, which were illegally annexed by Moscow months after the all-out war began on Feb. 24, 2022.

Russian citizenship, language and culture is forced upon residents, including in school lesson plans and textbooks.

Some residents live in fear of being accused of sympathizing with Kyiv, according to Ukrainians who have left. Many have been imprisoned, beaten and killed, according to human rights activists.

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.

Russian officials have refused to comment on past allegations by U.N. human rights officials that it tortures civilians and prisoners of war.

One family's plight

Inna Vnukova spent the first days of the Russian occupation in the Luhansk region hiding in a damp basement with her family. Outside in her village of Kudriashivka, soldiers 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 in Estonia, where she now lives. The troops sought out officials and civil servants like her and her husband, Oleksii Vnukov.

In mid-March 2022, she and her 16-year-old son, Zhenya, fled the village with her brother’s family, even though it meant leaving her husband behind temporarily. They risked a trip by car to nearby Starobilsk, waving a white sheet amid mortar fire.

Oleksii Vnukov, a court security officer, stayed for nearly two weeks. Russian soldiers twice threatened to kill him before he escaped.

“The people there aren’t living, they’re just surviving,” he said of the 150 people — including the couple's parents — who still live in the village that once was home to 800.

Vnukova and her husband have a new life in Estonia, where she works in a printing house and he is an electrician. Their son is now 20, and they have a 1-year-old daughter, Alisa.

Life in shattered Mariupol

Russian forces besieged Mariupol for weeks before the port city fell in May 2022. The bombing of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater on March 16 of that year killed nearly 600 people in and around the building, an AP investigation found — the war's single deadliest known attack against civilians.

Most of the population of about a half-million fled but many hid in basements, said a former actor who huddled for months with his parents.

The former actor, now in Estonia, spoke on condition of anonymity to not endanger his 76-year-old parents, still in Mariupol. They took Russian citizenship to get medical care and a one-time payment equivalent to $1,300 per person as compensation for their destroyed home, he said.

Housing remains a problem even though the population is about half of what it was before the war. New apartments are sold to Russian newcomers — not those who lost their homes, according to complaints sent by video to Putin.

Not everyone opposes the Russian takeover. The former actor says half of the members of his old troupe support the Kremlin. Still, he said his parents asked him not to send postcards in Ukrainian because “it could be dangerous.”

Crumbling infrastructure

Years of war and neglect have saddled many cities with crumbling municipal services.

In Alchevsk, a city in the Luhansk region, over half the homes are without heat in this bitterly cold winter. Five warming stations have been set up.

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.

Moscow encourages Russians to move to the occupied regions, offering various benefits. Teachers, doctors and cultural workers are promised salary supplements if they live there for five years.

The northeastern city of Sievierodonetsk, once home to 140,000 people, suffered significant damage and now has only 45,000 mostly elderly or disabled residents. Only one ambulance crew serves the city, and Russian medical workers rotate in to staff its hospital, said a 67-year-old former engineer who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

“I know how difficult it is now for the residents of the liberated cities and towns. There are many truly pressing, urgent problems,” Putin said in September. He cited the need for reliable water supplies and access to health care, and said he has launched a “large-scale socioeconomic development program” for the regions.

Living in fear

Stanislav Shkuta, 25, from 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, and "men and women were asked to strip to the waist to see if they had Ukrainian tattoos.”

Shkuta, now in Estonia, said he “turned white with fear, wondering if I’d cleared everything on my phone.”

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, he added.

Mykhailo Savva of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine said "Russian special services continue to identify disloyal Ukrainians, extract confessions, and continue to detain people,” with residents facing document checks and mass searches.

Human rights groups say Russia used “filtration camps” early in the war 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.

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.

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Katie Marie Davies in Manchester, England, contributed.