Putin beordrar styrkor att gå in i Ukraina - INVASION NU (2022-02-24)

Pressure is mounting on Ukrainian citizens of the occupied areas to accept Russian citizenship. From 1 January 2024, health care has been denied to those without Russian passports. The authorities are also making plans to require Russian passports for internet use, and for those without heating who need gas heaters.
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The campaign to force people to abandon their Ukrainian nationality began in Donetsk and Luhansk in 2019, and in Zaporizhzhya and Kherson after the 2022 invasion. Threats soon multiplied against those who refused. By May last year Russian prime minister Mikhail Mishustin said 1.5 million passports had been handed out, and the total has kept on rising since then.
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And of course, the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia continues. Sergei Mironov, leader of one of the tame “opposition” parties in the Russian parliament, has illegally adopted one of them.
Passports are also a means of controlling dissent. The occupation authorities have prepared paperwork for depriving people of citizenship and making them stateless, on the FSB’s recommendation. This will be used against the “rising mood of protest under occupation, caused by social and economic problems”, the EHRG warned.
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As Russian forces entered southern Ukraine in 2022, civilians were terrorised with heavy aerial bombing. The scale of devastation, which Russia did its best to conceal, is becoming clearer: in Mariupol, estimates of the civilian death toll range from 8,000 to 25,000 or more.
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An investigation by the Financial Times shows that Russian media film of the city’s reconstruction is falsified window-dressing. Many of the 100,000 people who remain in Mariupol — less than a quarter of the pre-invasion population — are in ruined flats without heat, water and other necessities.
Bombing paved the way for brutal structures of repression. Elected local officials and journalists were targeted for arrest as the Russian army arrived: some, including Ihor Kolykhaev, the mayor of Kherson, are still being held. Most of those released had been subject to torture or ill-treatment, the UN Human Rights Commissioner’s office reports.

Russian authorities continue to conscript Ukrainian civilians in occupied areas or otherwise try to forcibly enlist them, including those in detention, into the Russian military, Human Rights Watch said today. Russia’s practice of compelling Ukrainian residents in occupied areas to serve in its armed forces is a war crime.
“Russian authorities openly and unlawfully force men in occupied areas of Ukraine to fight against their own country,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Less visible is their practice of pressuring Ukrainian civilians in detention, who have nowhere to hide or flee, to join the Russian forces.”