On the streets of Russian‑occupied Ukraine, parents warn their children not to speak Ukrainian.

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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........

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