By Galina Korol | 2024-08-22

KYIV -- Russian occupiers are coercing the residents of occupied parts of Ukraine to drop their Ukrainian identity, officials and activists told Kontur.

Every day, new prohibitions come down while actions to develop "Russian traditional values" intensify.

"The occupiers are stating that they are fighting everything Ukrainian ... residents of the temporarily occupied territories should expect the terror to ramp up," Ivan Fedorov, chief of the Zaporizhzhia provincial military administration, warned in May on Telegram.

This coercion was confirmed by six Ukrainian children and their parents whom the Ukrainian authorities recently extracted from Russian-occupied territory.

The families fled because they felt oppressed and realized the future awaiting their children, said Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian ombudsman.

"The families with children from Zaporizhzhia and Kherson provinces are now safe," Lubinets wrote on Telegram August 13.

Before they escaped, "their children were forced to attend a Russian school ... [the authorities] pressured Ukrainian citizens to obtain Russian-issued documents ... [and] Russian forces broke into the families' homes to conduct baseless searches," added Lubinets.

The occupiers are focusing on "patriotic" indoctrination of children and other young Ukrainians, Yuriy Sobolevsky, the first deputy chairman of the Kherson Provincial Council, told Kontur.

When children speak Ukrainian in school, educators have summoned "the parents and threatened to turn them over to occupation police and the FSB [Russia's Federal Security Service," he added.

'A death camp for Ukrainian identity'

There are two realities in the occupied portion of Kherson province, Sobolevsky said.

On paper, residents have carte blanche to speak Ukrainian, he said.

In reality, "people are afraid to speak their native language ... officials [from Russia] react very negatively when they hear Ukrainian," he noted.

Speaking Ukrainian in public could lead to a trip to "the basement" -- any of the countless locations where Russians imprison and torture Ukrainians who have defied them.

In one case in Berdyansk, Zaporizhzhia province, Russian jingoist "Z-blogger" Kirill Fedorov and a companion bragged about causing the arrest of a gas station attendant who spoke Ukrainian to them.

RBC Ukraine posted the video of Fedorov and his companion on YouTube on June 25.

The female attendant's only offense was saying "Please insert your card" in Ukrainian.

"The Russians had a distinct goal: not just to seize territory but also to enslave the Ukrainians and obliterate their identity," Mykola Kuleba, the Ukrainian president's ombudsman for children in 2014-2021 and founder of Save Ukraine, told Kontur.

"What we're seeing in the occupied territories ... is truly like a death camp for Ukrainian identity," he said.

20 years in jail

Margarita Kharenko, a pharmacist from Melitopol, Zaporizhzhia province, most likely paid the price for communicating in Ukrainian.

On April 4, the Southern District military court in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, sentenced her to 20 years in prison on trumped-up charges.

Her conditions are terrible, her friend Elizaveta told Kontur.

Elizaveta, now living in Ukrainian-controlled territory, withheld her last name to protect herself and relatives still in Russian-occupied Ukraine.

"She's in a cell [in Rostov] with two other young women," said Elizaveta. "They can't go outside, and once a day they're fed some sort of unidentifiable mush and a glass of water."

Russian occupiers abducted Kharenko at her residence January 9, 2023, said Elizaveta.

In the early days of the full-scale invasion and occupation, Kharenko and Elizaveta worked together to deliver medicine to pharmacy customers when normal retailing and distribution broke down.

Sources differ on whether it was "troops or the FSB" who kidnapped her, said Elizaveta.

The charges against her were preposterous.

"At first they [prosecutors] said that Margarita led a guerrilla movement and that she had planned 40 explosions that happened in the city. Then there was another claim that she instigated a terrorist act," said Elizaveta.

Eventually the Russians convicted Kharenko of "attempting to assassinate a Russian serviceman and of ... espionage and involvement in the organization C14 [a Ukrainian far-right organization]. Margarita had no connection whatsoever to C14," Elizaveta said.

Kharenko had ties to only one organization, her Baptist church, and frequented a social network page that had posts in Ukrainian.

"I think ... someone turned her in," said Elizaveta. "Most likely the first and main reason [for arresting her] was her pro-Ukrainian stance."

Such groundless prosecutions serve to spread Russia propaganda and to intimidate the dissenters still in occupied territory, said Elizaveta.