THE KREMLIN’S OCCUPATION PLAYBOOK: - COERCED RUSSIFICATION AND ETHNIC CLEANSING IN OCCUPIED UKRAINE

The entire 2014 passportization effort took media claimed that 96.77 percent of voters voted place in the inherently coercive conditions of a in support of “the reunification of Crimea with Russian military seizure of the peninsula followed by Russia with all the rights of a federal subject of a Russian military occupation of it. [...] 36 Part of this Russian strategy centers on the Russian military the psychological impact of the increase in the number footprint in the occupied penin- Russian occupation—Ukrainian of Russian nationals in sula—Russian population increases sociologist Iryna Bekeshkina Crimea since 2014 in a have resulted partially from an noted that the increase in the influx of 20,000-60,000 Russian Russian-ident. [...] the required translation will write out the names The Kremlin is also using the Russian co-optation of of children using the Russian orthography rather the Ukrainian school system to militarize Ukrainian than the Ukrainian. [...] Russian occupation of 18 percent of Ukrainian Russia has shown what it intends to do in the rest of territory and 5 million Ukrainian people in the Ukraine through its occupation of Crimea and the first instance, and using the current frontline as Donbas and its more recent illegal annexation of a springboard for further attempts to seize more additional Ukrainian territories. [...] The longer Russia is areas in places like Bucha, Irpin, Kherson City, allowed to occupy Ukrainian lands the harder it will and Izyum which were the sites of Russian atroc- be to reintegrate them into Ukraine, to say nothing ities in the early months of the invasion.119 of the additional lives lost and irrevocably damaged in the meantime.