Four years into its full-scale invasion – and 12 years into its war against Ukraine – Russia controls roughly 19 per cent of Ukraine’s sovereign territory. It has declared these lands ‘forever Russian’, staged referenda at gunpoint, and plastered cities with billboards proclaiming ‘reunification’ and a return to ‘normal life’.

Yet life in Ukraine’s occupied territories is anything but normal. Moscow cannot, or will not, provide even the most basic services to the people it occupies. Its imperial ambitions have, as so often in history, proven far larger than its capacity to govern.

This winter, civilians living in free Ukraine endured below-freezing temperatures without consistent access to heat, water, or electricity as Russia systematically pummelled civilian energy infrastructure. In response, the Ukrainian state had hundreds of repair crews working around the clock; thousands of emergency shelters offering warmth, hot meals and charging stations; and a co-ordinated appeal to international partners for generators, swiftly deployed to the hardest-hit communities.

Behind these measures lies a simple principle: that a government’s job is to look after its people – to respond to crises, to citizens, to obvious and urgent needs. For the millions of Ukrainians living under Russian occupation, that principle is a distant memory.

In the occupied territories, ‘governance’ takes on a different meaning. Its primary functions are symbolic and coercive: the erasure of Ukrainian identity, the forced distribution of Russian passports, the imposition of Russian curricula, the rewriting of property registries, and the staging of Potemkin reconstruction projects meant for television cameras rather than residents.

What is conspicuously absent is any serious effort to ensure clean water, reliable electricity, functioning sewage systems, adequate housing, or accessible medical care.

Nowhere is Russia’s failure more evident than in the water crisis stretching from Luhansk to Crimea. Much of the disaster is of Moscow’s own making. The destruction of the Siverskyi Donets-Donbas canal in occupied Donetsk and the blowing up of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam in occupied Kherson caused catastrophic flooding and environmental devastation. They also depleted reservoirs that supplied water far beyond their immediate regions, feeding Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and, via the North Crimean Canal, Crimea itself.

As a result, water levels across occupied Ukraine have hit historical lows. Last summer, in some cities, water flowed from taps for only a few hours once every three to ten days. What did come through was often brown, foul-smelling and unsafe. Residents resorted to collecting rainwater and scooping from puddles. Children filmed video appeals to Vladimir Putin, begging for water.

Occupation authorities responded with performative truck deliveries, erratic outage schedules, and cosmetic repair projects that did nothing to address a systemic collapse. Complaints numbering in the thousands, to local administrations and even directly to Moscow, yielded no meaningful change. The spectacle of water trucks makes for good footage. It does not make for functioning infrastructure.

The severe shortage of water has also aggravated food insecurity, which has spread inland from the frontlines as Russia systematically degrades agricultural capacity. Irrigation systems, silos, fertilizer depots, and fields have been damaged or destroyed. The collapse of the Kakhovka dam triggered drought conditions that devastated harvests in occupied Zaporizhzhia region; grain yields reached their lowest levels since 2003. In occupied Kherson region, yields have also fallen dramatically.

At the same time, Russia has methodically expropriated and exported Ukrainian grain, primarily through occupied Crimea. Farmers lose not only their harvests, but also their seed stock and future viability. The pattern of destroying local production, extracting what remains, and exporting it for profit, carries uncomfortable historical echoes. For Ukrainians, the shadow of the Holodomor, the Soviet-engineered famine that killed millions in 1932-33, is rarely out of mind. It is, however, out of sight, as Russian occupation authorities have destroyed any memorials to victims of the Holodomor.

Empires feed themselves first. And while collaboration is the only mechanism for receiving even basic services, it does not necessarily protect you from the occupying authorities taking your property. For example, in occupied Donetsk, even residents publicly supportive of Russia have found their property declared ‘ownerless’ if they were deemed not to have ‘valid documents’ under new Kafka-esque rules. Their homes were taken off them and transferred to officials or redistributed to settlers from Russia.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of locals remain displaced or homeless. Construction projects stall. Workers go unpaid. New housing developments are marketed for sale rather than allocated to those who lost everything. Residents scrawl protests on construction fences demanding the return of their homes.

Normal rules simply do not apply. There is no system or mechanism to remedy injustice, only a total collapse of ordinary life. Public health conditions underscore the dysfunction. In some cities, sewage and drinking-water systems intersect disastrously. Tap water runs yellow-brown. Waste collection is erratic, leaving garbage piled along streets. Millions of tonnes of war debris remain uncleared in frontline areas.

Most urgent this winter has been the collapse of electricity and heating. Across occupied Kherson, prolonged blackouts and voltage instability have become routine. In Luhansk and Donetsk, entire cities have endured freezing temperatures without functioning boilers, sometimes for multiple consecutive winters, while residents continue to receive full heating bills. In occupied Zaporizhzhia, outages across the energy system have shuttered central heating systems. Emergency heating points, where they exist, appeared late, are too few in number, and are primarily symbolic gestures.

The contrast with government-controlled Ukraine is stark. Kyiv is struggling under relentless bombardment of civilian infrastructure, yet it mobilizes repair crews, establishes shelters, and coordinates international aid. In the occupied territories, the outages are not the result of Ukrainian strikes on civilian systems. They are the cumulative product of neglect, corruption, resource diversion to the Russian military, and a governing philosophy that does not see civilian welfare as a priority. There is no international aid because Russia would never admit the problem, just as the Soviet Union denied mass starvation in the 1930s.

This is the essence of the Russian model on display in occupied Ukraine: the people exist to serve the state; the state exists to project power; governance is measured in imperial reach. Moscow can annex territory, stage referenda, rewrite textbooks and erect billboards proclaiming unity. It cannot reliably provide clean water, functioning sewage, or consistent heat to the people it claims as its own.

As the Trump administration continues to conduct erratic peace talks, and as Europeans struggle to muster sustained political and financial resolve, it is worth remembering what is at stake. For Ukrainians, whom Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have suggested should be handed over to occupation, the issue is painfully concrete: it is the choice between a state that tries to ensure people have water that runs, heat that works, food that grows, lets people keep their homes, and one that does not. The question is not only where borders will ultimately lie. It is what kind of governance will define – and potentially destroy – the lives of millions.