The Territory of Lawlessness

Occupation is not peace. A new Ukrainian report argues that Russian rule in occupied territories is just another battlefield, one where the law and legal institutions have become weaponized. Make us preferred on Google Flip Share Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Bluesky Email Copy Copied Content Share Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Bluesky Email Copy Copied Flip Make us preferred on Google At first the title seemed almost too emphatic, the kind of phrase one fears has been sharpened by advocacy rather than evidence: “The Territory of Lawlessness.” However, as the press conference in Kyiv unfolded on March 25, the title became diagnostic and not at all rhetorical. The event at Media Center Ukraine was, on its face, a presentation of a new analytical report by the Regional Center for Human Rights (RCHR). In substance, it was an evidentiary argument about how to understand Russian occupation. Distance has a way of turning occupation into abstraction. From afar, the occupied territories are too often discussed in the antiseptic language of strategy: front lines, frozen conflict, bargaining territory, gray zones, spheres of control. Such language makes the condition sound static and almost administrative. It flattens lived experience into cartography. Follow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official . The report resists that flattening with unusual force. The temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, it argues, are not “gray” or “buffer” zones in “disputed” territories, but places where “ the law as an instrument of protection has been eradicated, and replacement legislation has become a means of suppression, control, and assimilation.” Russia’s project, the report says, is not merely to hold land temporarily under military control, but to dismantle Ukraine’s legal order and replace it with a coercive Russian system of its courts, its police, administrative structures, citizenship regime, school system, and its punitive vocabulary. What is intentionally imposed is not chaos but something more insidious: law preserved in a form and hollowed out in purpose. Other Topics of Interest ‘Ukraine Needs Strong Civilian Firearms Law,’ Zelensky Says as Officials Prepare Bill Volodymyr Zelensky says Ukraine is preparing a new civilian firearms law as officials, military and lawmakers push to regulate weapon ownership during wartime. The inversion of law turned against the people it is meant to protect was the real subject of the presentation. Kseniia Korniienko, Senior Lawyer at the NGO RCHR Regional Center for Human Rights; Mykyta Petrovets, expert at the NGO Regional Center for Human Rights; Kateryna Rashevska, analyst at the NGO Regional Center for Human Rights, Ph.D. in International Law; Olena Khomenko, Member of the Ukrainian Parliament, Chair of the PACE Parliamentary Network on the Situation of Children in Ukraine (Photo: Media Center Ukraine) Kateryna Rashevska, analyst at the Regional Center for Human Rights and one of the report’s authors, put it in a sentence that clarified almost everything that followed. Russia, she said, is trying to persuade the international community that “occupation is peace.” But “occupation,” she insisted, “is a separate battlefield.” It is a remarkable formulation because it restores motion and violence to a condition that outsiders often imagine as static. Occupation, in her telling and in the report’s, is not what remains when active war subsides. It is war by other means. War not only by shelling and imprisonment, but by documentation, intimidation, school curricula, passport controls, confiscation orders, filtration procedures and the systematic conversion of civilian life into dependency. On that battlefield, Rashevska said, the adversaries are not principally armies facing armies. They are “Russian siloviki” confronting “Ukrainian civilians, mostly women, the elderly, and children.” That line gave the presentation of the report its shape and a moral center. Rashevska told journalists that between 3 and 5 million Ukrainians in occupied territories are exposed every day to human-rights violations. Some are the brutalities by now grimly familiar such as torture, arbitrary detention, forced deportation, forced transfer, forced mobilization. Others are quieter and, for that very reason, easier for the outside world to overlook: coerced passportization, cultural assimilation, russification, the militarization of children, political indoctrination through education. These abuses do not always leave blood visible on the floor, but they alter the conditions under which a people remains itself. “The international community is gradually developing a resistance to these violations,” Rashevska warned, noting that coverage of occupation has thinned as attention shifts elsewhere. One purpose of the report is to fight that numbness before it becomes a habit of forgetting. The report itself is built to resist forgetting. It draws not only on legal analysis and open-source documentation, but on roughly 300 cases the organization handled through UN treaty bodies, the European Court of Human Rights and submissions to the International Criminal Court. What emerged from that accumulation, Rashevska said, was not merely a catalogue of grievances but a discernible pattern of a Russian intentional system, consistent across regions and years, in which occupation does not suspend law but retools it against the people. Under international humanitarian law, occupation is temporary. It does not transfer sovereignty. The occupying power must preserve the existing legal order as far as possible and protect the civilian population under its control. Russia, the report argues, has done the opposite in every essential respect by unlawfully extending Russian legislation into occupied territory, imposing Russian citizenship, holding pseudo-referendums, establishing corrupt Russian-controlled courts and law-enforcement bodies, and criminalizing pro-Ukrainian identity through false charges of extremism, terrorism, or “discrediting” the Russian armed forces. The report’s introduction describes this not as an accumulation of excesses but as “a coordinated policy aimed at eradicating Ukrainian identity, forcibly altering the demographic composition of the population, and ‘legalizing’ annexation in the foreseeable future.” Kseniia Korniienko Senior Lawyer RCHR. (Photo: Media Center Ukraine) Kseniia Korniienko, a senior lawyer with RCHR provided clarity to Russia’s legal fraud. Occupation, she reminded the room, does not give the occupier sovereignty over the land it controls. Yet Russia has spread “its own legislation and a system of administrative, law-enforcement and judicial bodies” across temporarily occupied Ukrainian territory and now persecutes civilians for failing to comply with Russian laws that, “under every legal norm,” should not apply there at all. The effect is not merely the violation of rights but the destruction of remedy. Once Russian law is forced into place, nearly every abuse can be restaged as procedure. Torture can be followed by interrogation minutes. Expropriation can be accompanied by a registry entry. Deportation can be processed through a file. Violence acquires format. Torture chamber in Kherson. (Screenshot from a video by the publication “Mist”) The report is especially good at showing how propaganda, coercion and pseudo-justice form a continuum. One of its most revealing case studies is that of Vladyslav Yesypenko, the Radio Liberty freelance journalist detained in Crimea in 2021. Russian state media quickly turned him into a public character as a collaborator with Ukrainian intelligence, a man already guilty in the imagination before a courtroom had meaningfully convened. But the report notes a telling discrepancy. The occupation courts that later handled the case did not even rely on the espionage narrative so loudly amplified in propaganda. The mismatch is revealing. Truth was never the central concern. The media’s role was to saturate the space around Yesypenko with suspicion and guilt; the court’s role was to give punishment an official shape afterward. The sequence of arrest, narrative, sentence tells one nearly everything one needs to know about the system. The courtroom is not where force is tested against evidence. It is where force acquires paperwork. Another case follows Hennadiy Kharchenko, Oleksiy Zhernovskyi and Ihor Kim, Ukrainian servicemen prosecuted in occupied Donetsk. In Russian reporting they appear as Azov “militants,” ideological criminals whose convictions ratify the broader Kremlin story that Ukrainian resistance is extremism by another name. But the report reconstructs a different reality of fabricated charges, torture, broken teeth and ribs, dramatic weight loss, forced confessions, the conversion of Ukrainian military service into criminal identity, and a courtroom used to turn captivity into political theater. A state that invaded another country appoints itself moral judge over those who fought against its invasion. The obscenity is obvious. The occupation court is the institution built to normalize it. The report’s section on the “White Angels,” the Ukrainian police evacuation teams that rescued civilians from frontline areas near Pokrovsk, shows the same system from a different angle. Russian media portrayed the evacuation teams as child abductors. The report places that claim against the actual legal framework and the actual facts. Under Ukrainian law, children must be compulsorily evacuated from active combat zones under careful specific humanitarian conditions. These teams had helped move more than 10,000 civilians, including more than 1,000 children, away from direct shelling and likely occupation. The point is larger than debunking a lie. It is to show how occupation works rhetorically as well as institutionally. Protection is re-described as abuse. Rescue is recast as kidnapping. The state trying to preserve civilian life is made to appear criminal, while the invading power claims the language of order and guardianship and commits the crimes it attributed to the other. The report’s glossary of Russian distortions is one of its most quietly devastating and revealing sections. There, occupation reveals itself not just as a system of force but as a system of naming. “Special military operation” means full-scale invasion. “Saving children from hostilities” means deportation and forced transfer. “Military-patriotic upbringing” means indoctrination and militarization. “Reunification” means annexation. Euphemism is not a side effect of Russian rule here; it is one of its governing instruments. If the vocabulary can be bent far enough, reality itself becomes contestable. A child can be stolen and described as rescued. A territory can be occupied and described as returned. A court can persecute and still call itself justice. Still, a haunting moment of the press conference came not from doctrine but from one family story. Rashevska described a family from Zaporizhzhia that had gone to visit a relative in a village shortly before the full-scale invasion. They expected to stay only a few days. They brought almost nothing. Then, as she put it, “they woke up in occupation.” Few phrases better capture the obscene arbitrariness of modern war. A short family visit becomes indefinite entrapment. A bag packed for several days becomes all one has for an occupation that may last years. In Rashevska’s telling, what followed for that family was a compressed anatomy of Russian rule: near-starvation due to perceived disloyalty; limited access to humanitarian aid; threats of losing parental rights; pressure to accept Russian citizenship; coercion connected to mobilization. Then came the detail that seemed to make the whole room stiffen. Their teenage child, out tending cattle, became the target of Russian drone fire, part of the now well documented “human safari.” “They fully understood who they were aiming at,” she said. “But they did not stop.” The horror of that sentence lies in its banality. There is no ideological superstructure in it, only the deliberate choice to torment and murder civilians for sport, power, or training. The family eventually miraculously escaped back to Ukrainian-controlled territory. Rashevska’s point in telling the story was not that this was an extraordinary ordeal, but that it was not. One of the laziest and cruelest assumptions outsiders make about occupation is that people who remain under it must somehow have either acquiesced to it, adapted to it, or even preferred it. War traps as much as it disperses. People stay because they are scared, old, poor, ill, disabled, responsible for others, trapped by circumstance, or simply unlucky in timing. The report, and the casework behind it, is also a record of what happens when the outside world mistakes trappedness for consent. Mykyta Petrovets legal expert, Lead on Human Rights Protection RCHR. (Photo: Media Center Ukraine) Mykyta Petrovets, another report author, stripping away any lingering procedural illusion said the Russian legal system operating in occupied territory is “aimed at violating the rights of our citizens, not protecting them.” He rejects any comforting idea that the problem is institutional weakness or corruption in the ordinary sense. The courts and law-enforcement bodies in occupied Ukraine are not malfunctioning versions of justice. They are functioning precisely, intentionally as instruments of domination and coercion. Petrovets described a case from occupied Zaporizhzhia in which a person detained by the FSB disappeared for a year and a half. The family was told nothing. Then, abruptly, they learned that a criminal case had been opened because the detainee had supported Ukraine. After a hearing or two, a long sentence followed, and the person was deported to Russia to serve it. The sequence is by now systematically familiar: disappearance, silence, scripted legality, removal. The court does not interrupt abuse. It arranges it into admissible form. He used land confiscations in occupied Crimea to make the same point. Ukrainians who refused russian passports have seen property seized, yet cannot meaningfully go to court and argue from the legal world that once made them owners, because the court begins by denying that world’s authority. Here the violence is less theatrical but no less consequential. Occupation not just interrupts but directly attacks life’s continuity itself such as the thread connecting memory, ownership, home and state recognition. The land you bought, the house you built, the retirement you imagined, the documents you trusted to build your future upon, are all forced into a new hierarchy in which the invader’s paper outweighs your life. What the report calls a “legal vacuum” is therefore not emptiness but replacement. Ukrainian institutions are not merely absent; they are supplanted. Rights are not only violated; the means of invoking them are rendered fictitious or dangerous. This is why the report’s metaphor of occupied territories as “legal wounds on the body of the state and the international legal system” is earned and not at all a grandiose claim. A wound is not an abstraction. It is living damage. It can be neglected, misdescribed, normalized from afar. It still shapes the life of the body that bears it. The report is accordingly severe about the language of peace. “Peace without justice,” its introduction warns, is not realism but danger. Rashevska translated that warning into political terms at the presentation. Occupation cannot be recognized, de jure or de facto, as a transfer of sovereignty. These are not disputed lands. They are the sites of an ongoing internationally wrongful act that is accompanied by systematic human-rights violations and international crimes. Any peace formula that discusses the territories chiefly as future zones of status while neglecting the people trapped inside them risks becoming a grammar and legislature of abandonment and a condoning of the collapse of law. Kateryna Rashevska Legal Expert RCHR. Photo credit: Media Center Ukraine Rashevska also recalled reading about children who had endured Soviet occupation after the Second World War. The author she was reading, she said, associated that experience with four words: “fear, hunger, cold and unfreedom.” What unsettled her was how easily those same words describe Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory now, 80 years later. This observation carried the conference beyond law into historical pattern. Occupation is not only a legal condition or a military arrangement. It is a recurring human structure of fear made routine, deprivation organized, dependence engineered, and limited freedom made conditional upon submission. With careful discipline the report “The Territory of Lawlessness” asks for precision. It insists that occupation is not a pause in violence but one of its most durable forms; that a court can become an accomplice; that a passport can become coercion; that education can become an annexation tool; that law, once emptied of justice, can become among the occupier’s sharpest weapons. The report describes not just a territory where rights are violated. It is a territory where the protections of law are inverted. The language and machinery of legality are used to escort a people out of its own civic world. That is harder to describe than bombardment, easier for the outside world to normalize, and for that reason more urgent to name exactly. The report says stubbornly, with evidence, what occupation is before habit teaches everyone else not to see it. Consistent, coordinated, and legally binding actions by the international community are required. The report outlines 10 core recommendations that must serve as the foundation for a comprehensive international strategy with immediate demands to be made upon Russia for compliance to International Humanitarian Law. The Russian occupation is an organized system of dehumanization, achieved by integrating the occupied territories into the legal, economic, administrative, social, and cultural space of the aggressor state. A genuine restoration of the rule of law is only possible after the territories seized by the Russian Federation have been de-occupied and all persons involved in organizing and carrying out large-scale and systematic human rights violations have been brought to justice. The full report by RCHC Regional Centre for Human Rights can be downloaded here. Julian Knysh is an Australian-Ukrainian filmmaker and journalist based in Kyiv.