Armed Conflict — 2026-05-08

ISW Reports Russia Forcibly Resettling Ukrainians from Occupied Territories

An ISW special report published May 5, referenced in the institute's May 7 campaign assessment, documented a systematic Russian strategy to resettle occupied Ukrainian territory with Russian citizens, with the federal Unified Institute for Spatial Planning and development corporation VEB.RF jointly planning to relocate roughly 114,000 Russians into occupied areas by 2045. In occupied Mariupol, 75 percent of apartment purchases are by Russian immigrants and authorities have declared 13,000 housing units ownerless to facilitate transfers, adding 100 to 200 apartments to the ownerless stock weekly. Six Russian banks issue preferential 2-percent mortgages in occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts, with over 5,000 mortgages totaling 26.6 billion rubles already disbursed. Employment bonuses under the Zemstvo program offer up to 2 million rubles for professionals relocating to the occupied territories.

Analysis
Russia's resettlement campaign in the four annexed oblasts creates demographic facts designed to outlast any ceasefire, eroding the human geography Ukraine would need to govern returned territory. Russia ran the same playbook in South Ossetia and Abkhazia after 2008, where engineered demographic change foreclosed meaningful Georgian reintegration. Russia will likely continue and expand these transfers through the end of 2026, accelerating administrative integration regardless of battlefield developments, though the assessment rests on a single ISW source with an explicitly pro-Ukrainian posture and no primary documentary evidence. Moscow may instead characterize the movements as voluntary relocations from active combat zones, complicating IHL classification and blunting international accountability pressure.

1 sources

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment May 7 2026 - Institute for the Study of War