Just a few weeks ago, Irina was working in the Russian occupation administration in Kupyansk, a large city in northern Ukraine that was captured days after Vladimir Putin started his war against the country.
But then, as Russian troops fled the city and the Ukrainian army retook occupied areas in the north of the country, she and her family fled what they expected to be swift punishment for collaborating with the invading Russian force.
Evidence from the newly captured areas suggests that Russian troops regularly used force to quell local dissent and maintain control. At the same time, some said they welcomed and helped the Russians. Others, listening to the insistence of officials deployed in Moscow that they would stay there forever, decided to cooperate or simply try to live quietly under Russian rule.
For Moscow’s local allies, the sudden withdrawal of Russian forces, which ceded some villages and towns without resistance, was a turn that bordered on treason.
“Everyone told us, we are here now, we are here, you don’t need to be afraid of anything,” said Irina, recalling promises made by officials sent from Moscow. She accepted a job in the accounting department of the new local administration set up by Russia, she said. “Five days ago they told us they would never leave. And three days later we were shelled … And we don’t understand anything [about the offensive].
“Then we don’t get the point,” she said of the Russian military operation.
For months, Russia has been telling people in the occupied territories of Ukraine that it will stay there. The ruble was introduced, pensioners were told they would receive Russian pensions, and pro-Russian residents were recruited into the ranks of government employees.
“It is obvious that Russia will never withdraw,” Andrei Turchak, leader of Russia’s ruling party United Russia, said during a visit to Kupyansk in July. “Russia will never leave here. And all necessary help will be provided.”
This vow, along with the threat of violence, was crucial in projecting Moscow’s power into the towns and villages of Ukraine, assuring willing locals that they would never be punished as traitors or collaborators.
Now Russia’s withdrawal has dealt a devastating blow to the image of the Russian armed forces and the Kremlin among some of their most willing supporters in Ukraine.
Ukraine has vowed to capture locals who worked with the Russian army or with Russian-installed governments. Cases can be punished with a prison sentence of up to 15 years. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Wednesday that Ukrainian forces were trying to eradicate “remnants of occupiers and sabotage groups” in the recaptured towns and villages of the Kharkiv region.
In Belgorod, a Russian region bordering Kharkiv, the governor’s office said nearly 1,400 people are being held in a makeshift camp after crossing the border into Ukraine. Many are families with children who have fled fighting. Hundreds more people probably live in rented apartments or with relatives.
At a small aid distribution center in the city, half a dozen Ukrainians who recently fled to Russia said they were baffled by Moscow’s inability to hold the Kharkiv region and resist the successful Ukrainian counteroffensive, which has retaken 8,000 square kilometers (3,100 sq mi). ) territory in just a few weeks.
“People there believed the Russian troops, they said we won’t leave you, that we lost so many people and we won’t leave you,” said Alexander, 44, who lives with his wife and son in a nearby village escaped. “Then suddenly they withdrew. It took them several months to collect this whole area, and then they left in two days. They don’t understand what happened.”
Alexander, a skilled pipe welder, said he did not work for Russia and has not worked since the war began. He had wanted to leave his village, which quickly fell to Russia in the first days of the war, because he “had neither work nor school and I have to dress my child and send it to school”.
They had planned to join a brother in Poland, but then Alexander was wounded by a shell and they fled to a relative in Russia instead.
They left, he said, not because they opposed a return to Ukrainian rule but because of the danger of war. “It drove us to hysteria,” he said. “We took it as long as we could.”
Like others, he asked not to be called by his last name. He feared being viewed as a traitor for fleeing to Russia. He said he still hopes to return home to visit his parents in Ukraine.
Moscow’s efforts to integrate the territories through public handouts while enforcing a culture of fear in occupied Ukraine have been seen as a prelude to a formal annexation that could take place in some regions as early as this fall.
But the lack of security signaled by Russia’s sudden withdrawal has also shaken the confidence some had, making it more difficult in areas Moscow continues to hold.
“We should have left earlier,” said Sergei, Irina’s friend who worked at the local railway. It is now difficult to find a place to stay in Belgorod, he said, where thousands of people have moved since the war began.
Irina and Sergei both said they still supported Russia in the war but had less confidence that it could protect supporters in Ukraine.
“Now I’m worried about the people in Kherson and Zaporizhia,” said Irina, referring to the areas in southern Ukraine that are also occupied by Russia. “They’re also told, ‘We’re not going.’ But if you look at what happened near Kharkiv, nobody can say what will happen tomorrow.”
By many reports, Russian troops themselves and some of the Kremlin’s key supporters have said that Russia is in danger of losing its supporters in occupied Ukraine.
“People here are waiting for us to start,” Alexander Sladkov, a Russian war correspondent, said in a TV report. “That we hit them so hard they land on their butts. That is, a knockout. It’s very difficult to win by points. We are losing a large number of people, we have wounded.”
Catching himself, he added, “And we’re having great success.”
Russia hasn’t had much success lately. And its problems could only increase as cities held by Russia since the first weeks of the war emerge from isolation and tell tales of life under occupation.
It also triggered an exodus of people to the border. Earlier this week, Yulia Nemchinova, a local activist providing aid to Ukrainian refugees in Russia, shot video of some of the hundreds of cars fleeing the Kharkiv region on the Russian border.
A Ukrainian official described one such convoy from the Luhansk region as collaborators “packing their loot, packing their families and leaving”. Nemchinova, who holds pro-Russian views, confirmed that many insiders fear being labeled collaborators, although she described them as locals who she says are “just trying to live”.
“People have been told that Russia is here forever,” she said. “They were in shock. People were just black. They were literally black in color. I asked people where they were going, they said: to Russia. Just nowhere. Just to cross the border.”
Most at the aid center said they would only return to Ukraine if Russia retakes the territory. Others said they would not return at all even if Russia did return.
“We will never go back,” said Sergei, Irina’s friend, who was carrying a small bag of shoes and sweaters from the aid center. “There is nothing we can fall back on.”