A British strategy for Ukraine’s occupied territories
Russia occupies roughly a fifth of Ukraine, with around six million people living under its control. Ukraine’s allies tend to treat this territory as a humanitarian tragedy at the edge of the war. It is better understood as a security problem that requires humanitarian tools as part of any solution. We have made this mistake before, underestimating how an occupation can shape European security for a generation. After 2014 the West largely ignored the militarisation of Crimea, even as the UN passed resolutions condemning it. That peninsula became the springboard for the 2022 invasion and the base for occupying (parts of) Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, with more than 34,000 Crimeans conscripted into the Russian army since 2015. The territories taken in 2022 are being processed the same way, only faster.
In the four mainland oblasts alone, the Eastern Human Rights Group estimates the population has collapsed from 6.4 million in January 2022 to between 2.5 and 3 million today. Mariupol shows the pattern: a city of 450,000 now holds around 100,000 pre-war residents, while Russian settlers arrive at roughly 2,200 a month and will soon outnumber the locals. Forced passportisation is essentially complete, Russia’s November 2025 nationalities policy treats any expression of Ukrainian identity as extremism, and the UN has documented more than 15,000 civilian detentions, with fifteen-year sentences handed down for social-media posts.
The overlap between humanitarian crisis and security threat is clearest in what Russia is doing to children. Roughly 600,000 school-age children live under occupation, experiencing a curriculum that includes ‘basic military training’ and intense military-patriotic indoctrination. Tens of thousands of children have also been enrolled in additional military training programmes, like Yunarmiya and Warrior. Those cohorts will reach conscription age between 2028 and 2034, the window in which Russia anticipates renewed operations. We do not need to guess their fate; between the 2022 invasion and summer 2024 the SBU data suggests that more than 300,000 men were mobilised in occupied Donbas. Since January 2026, Russia has moved to year-round conscription. If we were to pay attention, we would see an occupied population becoming a renewable military resource in real-time.
The common conclusion, and admittedly one I hear repeatedly in interviews with those displaced by occupation, is that nothing can be done until liberation. I disagree. Britain has particular reason to act here: it has staked its own security on Ukraine’s and takes a leading role on sanctions and military support, and the measures below are cheap set against the cost of an occupation that hardens into a permanent source of manpower and instability on Europe’s edge.
The window is narrowing, but five things are possible now.
Enable evacuation and identification. Many residents hold expired or missing Ukrainian documents and have no consular access. Ukraine has the legal basis for remote identification but not the machinery: it liquidated its Ministry of Reintegration and scattered the function with no accountable centre. This belongs inside the Ukrainian state rather than outsourced to NGOs, so Britain’s job is to press Kyiv to publish a plain road map for leaving, empower its consular network to establish identity remotely, and rebuild a single accountable body for return. A campaign led by Bohdan Krotevych won a start: in June 2026 Kyiv launched a scheme to issue return documents through its missions in Turkey, Georgia, Armenia and Kazakhstan, even where the registers hold nothing. Britain should also press for the single most concrete step to change the departure calculus, a guaranteed period of protection from Ukrainian conscription for men who leave voluntarily, since they are far better in Ukraine than mobilised into the Russian army. The priority throughout is those aged sixteen and over, who face militarisation now and conscription at eighteen.
Back internally displaced Ukrainians as a channel. IDPs keep daily contact with relatives under occupation, and in our survey of 1,001 of them nearly half still talk to people inside, which makes them the most trusted carriers of practical information about evacuation, identification and rights. Two cheap things follow. First, fund the IDP-serving state functions organisations that provide legal, practical and psychological support, given that 76 per cent of IDPs rate the state as ineffective at helping them. Second, fund structured, security-screened debriefing of recent arrivals, whose granular knowledge of conditions inside no open-source monitoring can match.
Create genuinely useful news; not part-time information operations. The people I interview are scornful of outlets such as the Centre for National Resistance, precisely because they double as influence operations. People in the occupied territories are already subjected to mass propaganda campaigns by the Russians, what they need is service journalism on prices, healthcare, transport and legal rights, delivered through Telegram local-news channels that work over a VPN and will not get a reader arrested for having them on a phone. Successful pilot tests have paired automated delivery with human editorial control, produced by people from the territories living outside Ukraine and funded by sustained core grants rather than project cycles that demand the visibility this environment punishes.
Sustain the lifeline networks. This is the precondition for everything else, and the task is to sustain, not to launch. Route small cryptocurrency transfers and alternative payments such as gift cards through the vetted, compartmented non-profit networks already moving medicine, food and cash through these territories, along with the security those networks need to survive: factory-reset unlocked phones, clean SIMs and reliable VPNs. Pay the people who run them, because the assumption that loyal Ukrainians will keep working unpaid on patriotic duty has corroded the very networks delivery depends on. These took years to build and will collapse for want of resourcing.
Document crimes and get detainees lawyers. Russia runs what amounts to a pipeline of seven interlocking crimes against humanity, with at least 15,250 civilians held and only 168 released. Fund HUR’s coordination HQ and the organisations supporting it, to expand individual case files, which serve prisoner exchanges now and accountability later, and fund independent lawyers for detainees, since the former can be the difference between life and death for the latter. Press for civilian-detainee release to be a baseline condition of any negotiation framework from the outset. Widen sanctions beyond the obvious names to the machinery of occupation: the judges handing down fifteen-year sentences for expressions of Ukrainian identity, and the officials running the militarisation of children. Recording the ecocide belongs in the same effort, and in international legal fora.
All of these recommendations sit awkwardly within the preferred FCDO funding systems, which reward visibility. Grant competitions favour attributable, publicised results, and outsourcing delivery to commercial contractors adds an incentive to brand and promote the work. In occupied territory that incentive is lethal, because visibility is exactly what gets people identified, arrested or killed. A British-funded resistance programme run through a private contractor did precisely this: a Kyiv Independent investigation found it pushed activists into dangerous public acts and prioritised preserving its own funding over their safety, despite documented arrests, torture, and deaths. So this work must be done quietly, by people who genuinely understand the territories, and it should never be handed to for-profit contractors, whose commercial incentives conflict with the safety of the people they are meant to serve.
It also needs an owner. Whitehall postings turn over every couple of years, which is corrosive for programmes that live or die on hard-won relationships and contextual knowledge. This work should sit with a named Senior Responsible Owner who has genuine regional expertise, holds the authority to approve and halt individual activities, and stays with the programme for its life rather than the length of a posting, personally accountable for it to ministers and Parliament.
This is bigger than Ukraine. The occupation is a fusion of military force, demographic engineering and digital control that the Kremlin will use again if it is seen to work. But the nearer test is simpler: sovereignty over these territories, if it is ever restored, will have to be legitimised among the people who lived under occupation. The question of whether Ukraine and its closest allies, Britain among them, tried to reach these Ukrainians, or wrote them off, is ours to answer now.
Dr Jade McGlynn is an author and Research Fellow at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, and an Executive Committee Member of the New Diplomacy Project.
Photo credit: Spoilt.Exile via Flickr.