Moscow is planning to send five million Russian settlers to territories it occupies in Ukraine over the next five years, an analyst has claimed.
Petro Andriushchenko, head of Ukraine’s Center for the Study of Occupation, said that plans for the “integration” of lands currently controlled by the Kremlin’s forces were outlined at a conference in the western Russian city of Rostov-on-Don last week.
He claimed that Moscow has set a goal of increasing the population of the occupied territories — excluding the Crimean Peninsula, which was illegally annexed in 2014 — to 10 million by 2030.
“Currently, the real population doesn’t even reach five million,” Andriushchenko, a former adviser to the mayor of Mariupol, wrote on his Telegram account, quoted by the Ukrinform press agency.
“Where will they get an additional five million? That’s right - they will bring them from Russia.”
Reports indicate that the occupying authorities in the parts of eastern and southern Ukraine under Russia’s rule have pursued a wide-ranging policy of Russification, with residents told last month that they would need to take up Russian nationality or risk deportation.
It is also estimated that around 20,000 Ukrainian children have been relocated from Russian-run lands, with some allegedly sent to re-education camps to be turned “into the next generation of Russians.”
Mariupol population doubts
On his Telegram feed, Andriushchenko also said that the Russian-installed mayor of occupied Mariupol was deliberately exaggerating the number of people who have returned to the area in order to secure higher funding from Moscow.
The mayor, Andriushchenko said, claimed that 329,000 residents have “returned” to the port city - which endured a brutal siege in the early months of the war – but this number is almost as high as the area’s total population back in 2014.
Russian authorities have officially annexed the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions – despite only having partial control over the territories – and have allocated funding towards rebuilding infrastructure destroyed during years of conflict.
The Kyiv Post newspaper reported last month that some construction work was being done by migrant workers from Central Asia lured to the region by higher wages.
Meanwhile, Crimea, which was invaded and occupied by Russia over a decade ago, has undergone a demographic transformation since its annexation, researchers say.
As far back as 2021, the Jamestown Foundation reported that Russian policies had led to tens of thousands of Ukrainian nationals leaving the region, with over 200,000 Russian citizens being enticed to move in.
