Russia is building a surveillance state on stolen Ukrainian land

Mobile phones and personal belongings are routinely inspected. In schools, teachers must swear loyalty to a Russian curriculum or leave, and priests who refuse to fall in line are detained, beaten, or quietly disappeared. Surveillance is constant: CCTV cameras, informants, a state‑mandated app tracking who people call and what they read. And Russian forces - including FSB - inspect residential homes, often with large numbers of personnel, specifically looking for evidence of loyalty to Ukraine.

Across occupied parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Crimea it's not just a military occupation, but the construction of a digital prison state. Violence remains central to Moscow’s rule, but surveillance, censorship and information manipulation are now just as important as guns and artillery. The Kremlin’s object is to isolate Ukrainians from the outside world, sever them from their homeland, and replace reality with Kremlin fiction.

Moscow has built an entire architecture of control: AI facial‑recognition cameras in city streets and outside residential buildings, a heavy presence of Russian troops, National Guard units, and FSB working alongside a dense network of collaborators and newly arrived Russian settlers who monitor their neighbours. According to one member of Ukraine’s National Resistance who spoke with me, some collaborators even deliberately provoke political conversations – dropping lines like “Things were different under Ukraine…”- to see who can be marked down as disloyal.

Phones are routinely searched at checkpoints and during unannounced home raids. Possessing Ukrainian media content, following Ukrainian news, or even having a VPN installed can result in detention, torture, disappearance, or transfer to filtration camps and prisons deep inside Russia. Refusing a Russian passport is treated as an act of resistance: people lose access to healthcare, utilities, notaries and social benefits, and risk losing their jobs or even their children.

In schools across the occupied territories, Russian‑appointed teachers and administrators have been turned into instruments of the state. Ukrainian teachers are forced to choose between delivering a Russian curriculum complete with militarised lessons and Kremlin‑approved history or giving up their jobs. Many manage to flee, but others who stay are met with intimidation or even detention and torture.

Some parents have tried to keep their children enrolled in Ukrainian online education. But, families who do so face home searches, arrests, and threats that their children will be taken away and placed in “re‑education” boarding institutions. Russian authorities require schools to provide lists of older teenagers suitable for future military service.

Religious institutions have also been folded into the occupation’s system of control. The Russian Orthodox Church increasingly functions as the arm and eyes of the Kremlin. In occupied territories, churches that refuse to subordinate themselves to Moscow are shut down, their property seized, and their clergy detained, tortured or even murdered for resisting.

Churches that once represented sanctuary are now viewed with deep suspicion. In Crimea, repression also targets the indigenous Crimean Tatar community, with politically motivated prosecutions, disappearances and constant pressure on their life.

This system of control is reinforced through technological domination. Russian authorities have dismantled Ukrainian telecoms infrastructure and rerouted internet traffic through Russian‑controlled networks. Ukrainian news sites and independent media are blocked; unfriendly social networks are restricted or shut off entirely; VPNs are criminalised. In many places, the internet can be throttled or switched off altogether, with blackouts and communications shutdowns lasting extended periods.

One of the most chilling developments is the rollout of Russia’s MAX super‑app across occupied territories, pushed as a convenient platform for messaging, banking and access to public services. Every message, payment, contact and official request becomes another data point available to the state, another way to map social networks and identify who might be quietly reading Ukrainian news or sending money to someone in free Ukraine.

Moscow, meanwhile, works aggressively to manufacture the illusion that occupied Ukraine is thriving. Pro‑Kremlin influencers and film crews produce carefully curated videos of rebuilt streets, cafés and playgrounds in cities like Mariupol and Berdiansk, often on land and in homes confiscated from Ukrainians who fled. The bombed‑out districts, the filtration camps, the torture sites, and the mass graves are never in frame.

But behind the camera lens, coercion and brutality have intensified. Residents report mass arrests, enforced disappearances and near‑constant fear. Ukrainians have been abducted, tortured and in some cases killed for acts as small as removing a Russian flag or following the wrong channel online. Some who dared to complain online were forced to record “repentance videos” under duress, publicly apologising for insulting the Russian army or spreading so‑called extremist content.

Young people are being cut off from the outside world and immersed in a closed ecosystem of propaganda, militarised narratives and Russian state ideology. Tens of thousands of children have been forcibly relocated to Russia or Russian‑controlled regions, separated from their families and pushed into taking Russian citizenship.

In the West, we often measure war in territorial gains and losses, in the lines on a map that inch forward or back. But what is happening in Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory should alarm every democratic society. Because this is not just a military occupation. It is an attempt to engineer obedience through surveillance, fear and manufactured reality – a test case for whether you can reprogram a population by closing its information environment and punishing any act of independent thought.

That is not governance in any democratic sense; it is rule imposed at gunpoint and enforced by data, informants and repression. Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory is not a different “system” of government – it is a machinery of coercion used against civilians, and it should never be mistaken for peace.

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Megan Gittoes is a Senior Non-Resident Fellow of the New Lines Institute

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