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• Russian occupation authorities in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia oblast have adopted a “preventive threat elimination” approach, presuming civilian disloyalty by default and ordering troops to conduct random searches, phone inspections, and detentions.
• Since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the resistance in the occupied regions has escalated sabotage operations against Russian military logistics, derailing trains in occupied Zaporizhzhia, spreading pro-Ukraine information, disrupting rail lines in Crimea, and targeting infrastructure inside Russia.
• Ukrainian resistance imposes persistent logistical and administrative costs that compel Moscow to expand repressive measures. The Kremlin has imported police personnel into the occupied territories of Ukraine, expanded surveillance, and increased its budget for “National Security and Law Enforcement.”

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The Kremlin is standardizing a securitized occupation model that treats civilian populations as security risks that have to be preemptively neutralized. The Kremlin’s overall occupation strategy has produced compliance under coercion but not durable political legitimacy. While the [Ukrainian] resistance does not currently threaten Russia’s territorial control of Ukraine’s occupied regions, its persistence forces the Kremlin to rely increasingly on imported security personnel, expanded surveillance, and growing internal security expenditures. Russian governance in the occupied territories remains structurally dependent on sustained repression, challenging its ability to maintain long-term political stability and exposing occupation as a system maintained by coercion rather than integration.