Russia Is Depopulating Occupied Ukraine and Importing Its Own Replacements
Classic imperial playbook: squeeze out the locals with war and terror, then pay Russian bureaucrats fat bonuses and stolen apartments to move in.
A fresh briefing from GUR laid out the numbers, and they are chilling. The population of the Donbas has collapsed by nearly half over the past two decades, dropping from over seven million to roughly 3.75 million. The natural population decline in occupied Donetsk is more than double the already dismal rate inside Russia itself.
To fix the demographic desert they created, the Kremlin is literally importing a brand-new population. Hundreds of thousands of Russian civil servants, teachers, and doctors are being bribed into moving to occupied cities with double salaries, huge daily allowances, and subsidized mortgages on expropriated Ukrainian homes. An imported bureaucrat can pull down over five thousand dollars a month—eight times the Russian average.
On top of that, thousands of plots of stolen land in occupied Crimea are being handed out free to Russian soldiers. The master plans even spell it out in black and white: occupied Mariupol is slated to artificially double its population by 2035 purely by shipping in Russian settlers.
Under international law, moving a civilian population into occupied territory is a war crime, but Moscow is treating ethnic replacement like a real estate development project.
Source: GUR
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