Since the Kremlin declared the Donetsk People’s Republic part of the Russian Federation in late 2022, Moscow has pursued a two-track consolidation strategy: public ceremonial legal acts that claim irreversible sovereignty, paired with administrative measures intended to make that claim functionally real on the ground. The legal choreography began with the submission and rapid ratification of accession “treaties” and federal constitutional laws in early October 2022, steps President Vladimir Putin and the Russian legislature used to portray annexation as complete.
Those formal steps were immediately met by sweeping international non-recognition. On October 12, 2022, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution ES-11/4 declaring the referendums and subsequent annexations invalid under international law. That political judgment remains the foundation for the broad diplomatic and sanctions response to Moscow’s moves.
Legal symbolism, however, was only the opening act. From 2023 into 2024 Moscow put in place instruments that anchor individuals and public services to Russian law. A decisive element was the April 27, 2023 presidential decree that expanded and formalized a simplified pathway to Russian citizenship for residents of occupied Ukrainian territories. The decree signaled that citizenship engineering would be the core mechanism for turning territorial claims into demographic and juridical facts.
Passportization was the operational manifestation of that policy. Throughout 2023 and 2024 Russian officials repeatedly announced very large numbers of passports issued in the four occupied regions. Moscow claimed millions of documents had been handed out by mid to late 2024, a figure that, if accurate in scale, would materially change the legal status of many residents and increase Moscow’s leverage over access to services, mobility and, crucially, obligations such as conscription.
By the end of 2024 Moscow hardened the mechanics. In late 2024 officials and some monitoring groups reported that passports issued by the self-styled Donetsk and Luhansk authorities were being declared invalid as part of a transition to Russian documentation, and local commentary warned that residents without Russian papers faced loss of access to services. Those administrative deadlines, framed by occupation authorities as a route to legal normalcy under Russian law, were effectively a coercive tool: documents would determine who could collect pensions, access healthcare, own property and remain in place.
Consolidation also involved practical incorporation into Russian state systems. Russian federal bodies publicly reported the integration of pension and social services for residents in the newly claimed entities during 2024, indicating an operational transfer of benefits and administrative processes from Ukrainian institutions to Russian ones. That transfer is a structural investment in long term control because welfare systems and payrolls create dependencies and administrative records that persist regardless of military fortunes.
None of these formalities eliminated a central political and military reality: Russia did not, and does not as a matter of 2022–2024 record, control every square kilometre of the oblast it claims. Moscow’s October 2022 legal acts annexed territories of which significant portions remained contested or under Ukrainian control. The discrepancy between legal claim and field control has been central to both Kyiv’s resistance strategy and Western strategies of non-recognition and targeted sanctioning.
Why do these formalities matter strategically? First, they raise the political and legal cost of any negotiated settlement for Ukraine and its partners by attempting to convert occupation into a set of interlocking administrative facts. Second, they create durable obstacles to reintegration: reestablishing Ukrainian sovereignty after large scale, state-run documentation, pensions and property transfers would require dismantling bureaucracies that produce winners and losers. Third, passportization changes individual incentives in ways that are difficult to reverse. Where access to medicine, social payments, and legal status depends on taking a Russian passport, many residents will opt for survival even if they remain privately opposed to annexation.
The long-term geopolitical consequence is a partially institutionalized de facto separation that Moscow can point to as factual foundation for continued claims, even as the international legal order and most states refuse recognition. This asymmetry between domestic legal consolidation and international illegitimacy is the defining structural risk for any future negotiations: formalities designed to lock in control sharpen, rather than close, the conflict over status. That reality makes durable peace harder because it enlarges the stakes around territorial lines and raises the cost of compromise for Kyiv’s domestic politics and for Western governments that have pledged not to recognize forced territorial changes.
Policy implications are straightforward but difficult. Western and Ukrainian strategy cannot rely solely on rhetorical rejection. States opposing the annexation must sustain policies that protect the rights of the displaced and the occupied, preserve Ukrainian legal claims over property and nationality, and deny the practical fruits of annexation such as recognition-based economic normalcy. At the same time Kyiv and partners must plan for a long administrative contest: building records, legal instruments and assistance programs that can be reversed or neutralized on de-occupation, while avoiding creating perverse incentives that abandon civilians in place.
In short, Russia’s Donetsk consolidation is less a single act of law than a layered campaign to convert military control into administrative permanence. The annexation formalities of 2022 were the declarative horizon. The subsequent years have been an effort to populate that horizon with people, papers and payments. The strategic effect is slow accretion: each administrative step lowers the probability that the status quo can be unwound without heavy political costs. Any sustainable resolution will have to contend with those bureaucratic facts, not only with maps and military positions.