"Textbooks are now supplied by Russia. They now try to eradicate anti-Stalinist ideas. There is also a lot going on in favour of militarisation. Children starting to learn how to operate drones."

And it can be attributed to coercion as people can apply for more benefits or re-register their property only with Russian passports.
"The more people that took up a Russian passport. The greater the pretext for Moscow intervening in Eastern Ukraine - To protect Russian speakers and ethnic Russians"

"The referenda in 2022 took place in a war zone. The whole process was extremely militarised we've seen footage of people being forced to go to the ballot box at gunpoint. By no measure was this free and fair election. But as a result we saw the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk to vote to join Russia"

"People fled to both sides. Inside Ukraine's there have been 4.5 million, internally displaced people, of which about one million was from the annexed regions. In 2023 the UN estimated that more than a million people have fled Ukraine for Russia."

Major parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions have been experiencing varying degrees of turmoil for the past 11 years. Some estimates put the number of dead in this war at 14 thousand, even before 2022. After the full scale invasion, at a time when Russia struggled to boost the number of its

The song kicks in-I hope you like it!
Sending love & strength to all the federal workers who lost their jobs. I hope you'll join the team of door knocking, phone banking, postcard writing resistance to these fascist fkers. We'll take this country back, impeach this ahole & his entire cabal of thugs!

soldiers, it must have come in handy to add a new territory as an extra source of manpower.
"We saw those occupied areas being used as a bridge head for attacks on the rest of Ukraine, and we saw residents of Donbas being forcibly mobilized to fight for the Russians."

"if we look at the Ministry of Defence statistics from Russia's mobilisation in September 2022 when it called up 300 000 people to go and fight… 80 000 were from the Donbass, the areas that Russia said it was trying to protect."

And because of the heavy losses on the battlefield, the mobilisation was also called “mogilisation”, after the Russian word for grave mogila… But as useful as these men were for the army, there are hints of them being treated as second class Russians.