En route to Saudi Arabia, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a blunt warning: A Trump-brokered peace with Russia could mean handing Ukrainian land to the invader.
“They’ve [Ukrainians] suffered greatly, and it’s hard to talk about concessions after all that pain. But that’s the only way this ends, to prevent even more suffering,” Rubio said as he headed for high-stakes negotiations with Kyiv.
While the Trump administration’s increasingly rigid stance is no longer a secret, Rubio’s claim that Ukraine’s inability to reclaim its internationally recognized borders “in any reasonable time” raised suspicions about US readiness to legitimize Russia’s land grab of — a possibility Kyiv repeatedly ruled out in the peace process.
“The most important thing that we have to leave here with is a strong sense that Ukraine is prepared to do difficult things — like the Russians will have to do difficult things — to end this conflict,” Rubio told reporters.
Left unsaid in Rubio’s peace formula: these “difficult things” could abandon millions of Ukrainians trapped under a regime that declared the erasure of their identity as a non-negotiable goal — a compromise with international law whose human toll could eclipse even the devastation of the current war. For those left behind, “peace” at any cost can mean trading artillery fire for decades of systematic repression with no end in sight.
The place where suffering can’t be relived
With 20% of Ukraine’s territory currently under Russia’s grip, nearly six million Ukrainians — including 1.5 million children — remained under occupation as of June 2024, according to Ukraine’s Minister for Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories.
Of these, 2.8 million people in Donetsk and Luhansk have endured Russian control since 2014, placing them squarely in the crosshairs of the Kremlin’s systematic brutality should Trump’s peace plan surrender these regions to Russia.
“Russia uses mass violence and severe human rights violations as a systematic practice,” says Alyona Luneva, advocacy director at the Zmina Human Rights Center. “This is not an excess of individual perpetrators; it is a tool of pressure and subjugation.”
Civilians in Russian-held areas endure a significant portion of 153,000 Russian war crimes documented by Ukraine’s General Prosecutor, with investigation now crippled by Trump’s recent aid cuts.
Rights defenders agree that Russia’s abuse in occupied territories is driven by a strategic goal: the destruction of Ukrainian identity, cloaked in Putin’s euphemism of “denazifying Ukraine” — the war objective that Moscow has recently reaffirmed amid Trump’s growing push for peace.
“Those who don’t fit into this [Russian] framework are persecuted, tortured, and killed,” Alyona Luneva says. “All these torture chambers are about Ukrainian identity and the refusal to let Ukrainians exist.”
In this light, the experts alarm that freezing the war, let alone legalizing Russia’s land grab, won’t stop civilian suffering but escalate rights violations, with potential US-backed concessions greenlighting even more abuses.
“Any ceasefire that would hand over the occupied territories to Russia would leave millions of Ukrainian citizens at the mercy of an occupying power with a documented history of human rights violations,” Alyona Luneva says.
Trump vows his peace deal will end Russia’s war and save lives. Ukraine’s war victims have a word to say
Mass deportations: Putin’s warrant-worthy crime
One of the most alarming practices is the mass deportation of Ukrainian civilians, which has surged since Russia’s full-scale invasion. Since 2022, the Kremlin has forcibly deported 2.8 million Ukrainians, as estimated by Ukraine’s human rights commissioner — a blatant breach of the Geneva Conventions, also considered a war crime under the Rome Statute.
The evidence proves that Moscow deliberately planned the mass deportations, with a nationwide network of detention centers exposing a coordinated effort between the government, regional authorities, and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Accounts reveal that Russian authorities methodically send Ukrainians to remote regions, stripping them of money, phones, and documents while imposing countless legal and bureaucratic hurdles to block their return to Ukraine or EU countries bordering Russia.
Alyona Luneva points out that Russia uses deportation not just to enforce loyalty, but also for population replacement in occupied areas, undermining their reintegration into Ukraine. Since 2014, Moscow has settled nearly 1 million of its citizens in Crimea — almost half of the region’s pre-war population. This strategy was then scaled up during the full-scale invasion, with key workers replaced by imported Russian personnel.
“Russia practices population replacement. They displace people they consider disloyal and bring in Russian citizens,” she told Euromaidan Press.
With this goal in mind, the Kremlin focuses heavily on the organized deportation of Ukrainian children. The Ukrainian government has identified 20,000 children deported from Russian-held areas, with only 1,221 brought back home. However, the real figure is likely much higher, with Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s Human Rights Commissioner, warning it can reach 150,000 minors.
Russia often masks the deportation of children as evacuation or recreational trips, taking them to isolated areas that prevent their return. There, they face forced assimilation and indoctrination. In March 2023, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, for orchestrating these deportations — a blatant act of genocide under international law.
Moscow ramps up its assimilation even further by forcing deported children into Russian citizenship and placing them up for illegal adoption in Russia — even those having families in Ukraine. A Yale report reveals that in three years, at least 314 children have been placed with Russian families, while 42 of them have been adopted or put under Russian guardianship.
“Russian ‘foster’ parents come to boarding schools and personally deport young Ukrainians to Russia, changing not only their identity but sometimes even their names,” Kateryna Rashevka says.
Manufacturing Russianess
Beyond deportations, the Kremlin furthers its assimilation strategy by sending Ukrainian children to re-education facilities disguised as recreational centers. These programs aim to instill loyalty to Russia and shape a new Russian identity among the children under its control.
Ukraine’s Regional Center for Human Rights has located 67 such facilities in Russia, 18 in Kremlin-allied Belarus, and several more in occupied Ukrainian regions, all pushing Russian narratives while erasing Ukrainian identity. In 2023, over 8,300 Ukrainian children were sent to these camps, and by the summer of 2024, this figure has soared up to 40,000.
Alona Luneva stresses that since 2022, reeducation efforts have spread beyond specialized facilities in Russia, infiltrating schools in occupied territories, with brought-in teachers enforcing Moscow’s propaganda-heavy curriculum.
“Access to Ukrainian children and youth in the occupied territories opens up numerous opportunities to shape their perception that Ukraine is not a country and that they have always been Russians,” she says.
Educational indoctrination is paired with a crackdown on information and the deliberate destruction of Ukrainian books. For instance, after occupying parts of Kharkiv Oblast in 2022, Russian troops destroyed all post-1991 books, including children’s stories. In 2023 alone, 2.5 million Putin-endorsed books flooded the occupied territories, pushing Moscow’s narrative.
“This is part of their goal to ensure that, in the occupied territories, no Ukrainians remain who identify themselves as Ukrainian citizens or as Ukrainians,” Luneva says.
Rights advocates warn that Russian-installed officials also push assimilation by sending students to complete their final year in remote Russian cities, further severing their ties to Ukraine.
“It is very likely that they will continue their education there and never return to the occupied territories,” Alyona Luneva says. “This way, the Russians are taking children from the occupied areas and dispersing them across Russia’s territory.”
Torture in broad daylight
The Kremlin’s occupation goes beyond forced assimilation, weaponizing abductions and torture to tighten its hold. Ukrainian human rights groups have identified over 20,000 civilians kidnapped by Russia during the full-scale war — and the true number may be even higher.
Despite international law banning the arbitrary detention of civilians — a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute — Russia relentlessly targets Ukrainian non-combatants, turning them into pawns for prisoner swaps. The Kremlin exploits gaps in humanitarian law defining their status, making them much more vulnerable to sham trials, torture, and a denial of justice compared to military prisoners.
Even in Ukraine’s longest-occupied areas, repression only intensifies once Russia strengthens its hold. In 2024, human rights defenders recorded 196 forced abductions in Luhansk Oblast alone — mainly of civilians who opposed the occupation or secretly supported Ukraine. Alyona Luneva says that over time, Russia’s legislation has legitimized the violence initially used to subjugate, complicating justice for victims.
“They [occupational administrations] didn’t stop torturing people,” she remarks. “However, now, after the torture, they’re taken to court and hit with criminal charges.”
Torture has become a disturbing hallmark of Russia’s occupation. According to Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andrii Kostin, 104 torture chambers have been found in recently liberated areas. Official records show over 3,800 civilians and 2,200 Ukrainian prisoners of war have suffered brutal treatment, though the real number is likely much higher, with up to 90% enduring torture — a breach violation of international law.
Torture has become a grim hallmark of Russia’s occupation. Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, Andrii Kostin, reported the discovery of 104 torture chambers in recently liberated areas. Official records identified over 3,800 civilians and 2,200 Ukrainian POWs who have suffered brutal treatment, though the real number is likely much higher, with 90% of Ukrainians in Russian custody enduring torture — a flagrant violation of international law.
Forcing Ukrainians to fight their own
Among Russia’s numerous human rights abuses in occupied territories, illegal mobilization has the most far-reaching impact. With Danish intelligence warning that Moscow could launch another war within five years, forcing Ukrainians under Kremlin control could pave the way for a broader European conflict.
Since 2014, Moscow has established a system of conscripting Ukrainians in occupied territories, a practice explicitly recognized as a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention. The Kremlin first deployed this tactic in Crimea, Ukraine’s first region to fall under Russian rule, disproportionally targeting minorities.
In a decade, Moscow has carried out 18 illegal conscription campaigns in Crimea, forcing nearly 30,000 Ukrainians into military service, with at least 769 eventually killed in combat. The Crimean Tatars, the region’s indigenous people with a history of resisting Russian claims for the peninsula, have borne the brunt, receiving up to 90% of notices in some areas.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin also kicked off a mass mobilization in Donbas, drafting up to 300,000 men from Donetsk Oblast, accounting for 75% of the male workforce in its Russian-controlled areas. The first draft in these newly-seized Ukrainian territories began in 2023, targeting young men aged 18 to 27. By autumn 2024, Putin’s decree expanded the draft, pulling men from partially occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts into the enemy forces.
However, the experts warn that the current conscription rate is just the tip of the iceberg. Russia methodically grooms a new generation of soldiers at the cost of Ukrainian minors, now militarized through compulsory education and state-backed youth organizations that operate in occupied territories. The Youth Army, Russia’s largest state-backed youth group run by the defense ministry, now counts 1.3 million members in Russia and over 35,000 children in occupied Ukraine, starting as young as eight.
In Luhansk Oblast alone, such groups have already indoctrinated 60,000 minors with Russian propaganda-dense extracurricular classes, compounded by combat training. Families are frequently coerced into participating under threats of persecution or losing custody, which means the number of children trapped in this system is set to rise.
“The militarization of Ukrainian children and their transformation into Russian soldiers poses a danger not only to Ukraine but also to other European countries, as it will inevitably lead to a new cycle of aggression,” Kateryna Rashevska says.
