By Halyna Hergert | 2026-07-10

A man in occupied Donetsk applied for a full-time job at the local branch of Russia's Investigative Committee. Officials turned him down flat. The reason: he was born there. Full-time posts go only to people sent in from Russia. Locals can pick up freelance work, nothing more.

That single rejection has cracked open a system Russia spent years trying to hide.

For over a decade, the Kremlin told the world it invaded to protect Russians in Ukraine's east. Now those same people can't get hired by the government that claims to represent them.

Pro-war commentators on Telegram, the kind who cheered the annexation, are asking why Moscow abandoned the very Russians it claimed to save.

"[Expletive] the 'Russian world.' People in Donetsk are once again turning out to be 'the wrong kind of Russians,'" fumed one "Z-channel" author.

A system, not a glitch

The Donetsk case isn't an outlier.

A June 19 investigation by the Ukrainian outlet RIA Pivden looked at puppet ministries in occupied Zaporizhzhia. Reporters found that in four years of occupation, local residents almost never held top jobs. Officials shipped in from Russia or occupied Crimea filled those roles instead.

The pattern held across five more agencies RIA Pivden examined: youth policy, natural resources, industry, construction and transport. Leadership churned constantly, but one rule never changed -- Moscow swapped one outside bureaucrat for another.

The "ministry of industry" alone cycled through eight different heads in four years, pulling officials from Russia's Sverdlovsk region, Tatarstan, Tyumen and the Moscow region. Some stayed only weeks before moving to run other occupied territories or heading home. Officials from Crimea, Volgograd and Saratov rotated through the construction ministry. Transplants from Saint Petersburg and Crimea ran transport. Bureaucrats from Chuvashia, Crimea and Saratov passed the natural resources post back and forth.

Researchers describe the arrangement as corporate-style rotation, officials moving between regions on orders from headquarters with no ties to the people they govern.

"What we are seeing is that even after twelve years of occupation, Putin and his people do not trust the locals one bit," Mykola Osychenko, a Ukrainian journalist and former president of Mariupol Television, told Kontur.

Serhiy Harmash, president of the Center for Research on Donbas Social Prospects and editor-in-chief of the OstroV news outlet, sees something larger at work. Russia, he told Kontur, is running a deliberate policy of population replacement in the Donbas, one designed to make life unsustainable for people who already live there.

Loyalty that never paid off

Understanding today's system means going back to 2014, Harmash said. Most people who welcomed Russian convoys back then weren't driven by cultural loyalty. They were making a bet. Social mobility in Donetsk had always been limited, and Moscow was offering more of it.

That bet paid off, briefly. While the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk republics existed as semi-independent entities, local collaborators ran their own territory and built their own hierarchies. Russia's 2022 annexation ended that. Actual Russians arrived, just as opportunistic but backed by the full weight of Moscow.

Mariupol illustrates the shift. A native of Russia's Vologda region now runs the occupation administration there. Russian transplants hold the majority of cabinet posts in the Donetsk People's Republic.

Harmash argues Moscow keeps local figures around purely for cover, so someone other than the Kremlin absorbs the blame when services fail. Imported officials also earn far more than local staff once travel allowances are factored in, even as prices climb. Locals are left with frozen wages and rising costs, a squeeze Harmash said is pushing people to leave.

No plan left

For those who stay and can't get government jobs, Russia has one main use: the military. Covert mobilization continues, Osychenko said, and stripping people of other options is the easiest way to fill it.

The economy backs up that pressure. Metallurgical plants sit idle for lack of water. Coal mines are shut. Fuel shortages have slowed logistics to a crawl, and garbage trucks can't run without diesel. Osychenko expects total collapse by winter.

Work has narrowed to two options: serving Russia's military or fixing its equipment.

Even Moscow's long-term intentions look uncertain now. "Perhaps there are no clear plans left at all," Osychenko said, describing the occupied territories as too costly to rebuild and too valuable to abandon.

People with resources are already leaving, some for Russia, others tracking down Ukrainian passports to exit as refugees toward Europe. Ukraine's strikes on Russian supply lines have shifted Osychenko's outlook. He now thinks a moment may come when leaving suits the Kremlin better than staying.