Drunkenness, looting and lawlessness: how Russian soldiers live in Ukraine's occupied territories

In the spring of 2022, Russian troops herded more than 300 local residents into the basement of a school in the Ukrainian village of Yahidne, while the soldiers themselves took over the floor above. For weeks, people slept sitting up, without food or fresh air; some died right there in the basement — yet the occupiers refused to let anyone remove the bodies, forcing the living to remain locked in alongside the dead.

"We suffered down there and slowly died, while they laughed, drank and shot at us upstairs. When someone was truly ill, we had to beg them to let the person out just to breathe some fresh air," local resident Ivan Polhui recalled in the documentary series "Linia" ("The Line"). The occupation lasted about a month — in late March 2022, Russian forces withdrew and Yahidne was liberated by the Ukrainian army. But many other territories have not been so fortunate: Mariupol, Melitopol, and parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions have remained under Russian control for years now, with thousands of Russian troops and security personnel permanently stationed there.

Foreign license plates on the streets of home

Getting information directly from the occupied territories is extremely difficult, since independent journalists are almost never allowed in. The picture of daily life under occupation is pieced together mainly from the accounts of those who managed to escape.

Liudmyla, a resident of Melitopol, told the independent Russian outlet Meduza how her hometown changed after the arrival of Russian forces: familiar faces disappeared from the streets, replaced by strangers and cars bearing Moscow and Krasnodar license plates. "You'd walk down the street and realize this wasn't your city anymore," she recalled. Before finally deciding to leave, she said she was afraid even to step outside.

This kind of fear recurs throughout many testimonies: civilians describe sudden phone and home searches, interrogations, detentions, as well as looting, drunkenness and violence by individual soldiers. According to Human Rights Watch, 18-year-old Dmytro, who grew up under Russian occupation, said that soldiers — often drunk — harassed both adults and children: stopping people in the streets during the day, showing up at homes at night. His family was visited several times a month; soldiers searched the house and questioned his parents about their attitude toward the occupation, any contacts with Ukrainian-controlled territory, and whether any relatives were serving in the Ukrainian army.

Hunting for empty houses

According to available testimonies, during such visits Russian soldiers are also interested in a more practical matter — which neighbors have left and which houses and apartments now stand empty. According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in occupied parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, soldiers demanded exactly this kind of information about abandoned property from local residents.

Some of these homes were then occupied by the soldiers themselves; others were simply looted. Witnesses say the occupiers carried off electronics, appliances, jewelry, phones, cars and alcohol. Those who refused to point out empty houses were in some cases threatened or beaten. Soldiers don't always wait for owners to leave on their own: reports from occupied Mariupol describe Ukrainians still living in the city being evicted from their own apartments, after which the properties were declared "ownerless" and placed under the control of the occupation administration.

Alcohol, weapons and shootouts among their own

The drunken soldiers Dmytro described appear in numerous other testimonies from the occupied territories — and it's not only Ukrainian civilians who report excessive drinking, but Russian servicemen themselves. An analysis of 67 interviews with Russian and Ukrainian soldiers, published late last year by Germany's Federal Agency for Civic Education, documents discipline problems, alcohol abuse and arbitrary violence within Russian units themselves.

The combination of alcohol and weapons sometimes turns deadly. In August 2023, a gunfight broke out in the village of Urzuf near Mariupol between Chechen fighters allied with Russia and servicemen of the local Russian military commandant's office. According to Ukrainian authorities, the conflict was sparked by a drunk Chechen fighter who opened fire on civilians; the shootout that followed between the rival Russian-aligned groups left at least four soldiers and seven civilians dead, including two teenage girls. The Russian-appointed representative for the settlement confirmed that the shooting and casualties took place, though the exact circumstances and death toll could not be independently verified.

Smaller-scale conflicts of this kind also occur. In January of this year, according to the Ukrainian partisan movement Atesh, three Russian soldiers were drinking together in occupied Donetsk and got into an argument over a captured thermal imaging scope taken from the front line — one of them allegedly pulled out a pistol and shot the other. This information likewise could not be independently confirmed.

Source: seznamzpravy.cz