Ukraine’s Displaced Must Not Be Ignored in Peace Talks

For a year now, the behind-closed-doors peace negotiations between the US, Russia, and Ukraine have been cloaked in mystery. A draft US-Russian peace plan leaked to US media at the end of 2025 contained only one point vaguely connected to those who live in or come from the areas of Ukraine that would remain under Russian control. The plan proposed establishing a humanitarian committee to implement a so-called family reunification programme, which probably means no more than the return of kidnapped Ukrainian children to their parents or guardians.

Yet Ukraine’s internally displaced citizens will be among the groups most affected by the outcome of the peace talks, whatever form it may take. It is therefore essential that their interests are clearly voiced in any negotiations.

Russia: neither in nor out

Officially, there are about 4.6 million internally displaced Ukrainian citizens. Among them are the estimated more than 1 million who were forced to leave Crimea and parts of the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014, when these areas fell under Russian control. Meanwhile, intellectuals, activists, and business people who remained in the occupied territories – and even taxi drivers who frequently crossed the front line, arousing Russian suspicions of being in contact with the Ukrainian security service – were regularly kidnapped, tortured, and detained in Russian-controlled Ukraine. Some are still in detention or missing.

Movement between the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine and the rest of the country, although much more complicated, continued until autumn 2023, when Moscow introduced its so-called filtration measures. Only one entry point – at the Moscow Sheremetyevo airport – remained open for those who had left the Russian-occupied territories and wished to re-enter. Travellers’ mobile phones are checked for what Moscow deems to be anti-Russian social media activity, bank transactions, and contacts. The overwhelming majority of those who left the Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine have failed to return. In parallel, Moscow began to nationalise property in the occupied territories belonging to owners who failed to show up in person with the appropriate documentation.

Russia has also proceeded with politically motivated repression in the occupied areas. Regular monitoring by the Media Initiative for Human Rights NGO of arrests and court sentences under the Russian occupation shows a disproportionate number of such cases in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine compared with Russia. Findings by Russian observers point to the same tendency of the occupied east and south of Ukraine to be at the centre of Russian politically motivated persecution.

None of this is being addressed by the sides negotiating an end to the war. Not a single participant has mentioned publicly any demands for Russia to limit its repressive legislation, which it has only advanced since 2022. There are few Ukrainians who would not fall foul of Russian laws on discrediting the Russian army, calling for the violation of Russia’s territorial integrity (for example, by insisting that Crimea be returned to Ukraine), or inciting hatred towards Russians.

Ukraine’s policy of no policy

On the other side of the front line, the situation for Ukraine’s internally displaced people (IDPs) is dire. For better or worse, there are no camps or other large settlements in Ukraine specifically designed for IDPs, only a tiny minority of whom have been accommodated in municipal dormitories or government institutions. Most receive no financial aid and depend on state social-security payments and care. But in January this year, all pension transfers to people from the occupied territories were abruptly suspended because the pension fund had failed to collect the documents now required from pensioners, leaving elderly IDPs with no means to pay their rent.

For the last 12 years, the Ukrainian state has never had a consistent and comprehensive policy towards the residents of the occupied territories and IDPs. This has resulted in both systemic and casual discrimination, as in the case of the unpaid pensioners. Things have worsened since last winter, when the government disbanded the ministry responsible for IDPs, says Tetiana Durneva, chair of the board of an NGO that has advocated for IDPs’ rights since 2016. ‘The state does not have a systematic vision of aiding people affected by the war,’ she said in an interview for this article. ‘And people who enforce regulations understand them through the presumption of guilt. If there is a regulation that can be reversed against a person, they often do so.’

When the war started in 2014, the Russian-speaking residents of Ukraine’s eastern regions were widely regarded as Russian sympathisers and even active collaborators. Defending them in any way could be political suicide for any politician in Kyiv. But now, the government is more concerned with finding ways to cover Ukraine’s growing budget deficit, including that of the pension fund. Solving the problems of Ukraine’s IDPs would require enormous investments that neither the Ukrainian state nor Kyiv’s international partners would ever make. The chosen approach seems to be to ignore them and leave the job of dealing with them to Ukrainian society’s strong horizontal connections and survival skills.

Time to engage the internally displaced

This is not the way forward. The budget deficit is only going to increase as Ukraine experiences a growing demographic crisis. Working-age citizens continue to leave the country, many with nothing left to lose in Ukraine and hence with no reason to return. Many cite the government’s treatment of IDPs as one of the reasons to look for a better life elsewhere. And this is precisely why Ukrainian negotiators in the ongoing peace talks should raise the question of IDP rights with their Russian and US counterparts.

There is a precedent for this. In 2020, four representatives of IDPs from Donetsk and Luhansk joined the infamous Minsk process, which Russia tried to use to turn Ukraine into a Bosnia-style federation with the autonomous republics of Donetsk and Luhansk under Russian control. The initiative originated in Kyiv and was probably intended to downgrade the status of the four representatives, whom Moscow had sent to negotiate while denying it was part of the conflict, according to Serhiy Garmash, a journalist who was one of the Ukrainian Donetsk representatives. ‘When the negotiations first began, no one remembered that apart from the separatists, there were other residents of Donbas,’ he explained in an interview. ‘They began negotiating with the separatists, ignoring the pro-Ukrainian Donbas.’

If not for humanitarian reasons, the Ukrainian side should engage the IDPs in negotiations to illustrate that the issue at stake is not the rightful division of the ‘two Ukraines’, as Moscow presents it.

Yulia Abibok is an independent researcher and journalist. Since September 2025, Abibok has been a fellow in the Ukraine Research Network@ZOiS (UNET), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space.