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The Detector Media Research Centre analyzed nearly 400,000 online media publications from 2022–2025. Occupied territories have not disappeared from the news, but they increasingly take a back seat to strikes, front lines, and negotiation scenarios. We explain what has changed, why, and what can be done about it. The full report is available at the end of this article.
In 2022, occupation was the main subject of every second publication mentioning temporarily occupied territories (51.5%); by 2025, this had fallen to just one in five (21.1%). Over this period, temporarily occupied territories increasingly appeared in news about strikes (17.1%) and peace negotiations (13.3%). At the same time, the regions have markedly different media “portraits.”
In August 2022, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty published a report titled “‘These Are Not Troops — They Are Beasts’: Two Men Guard a Village on the Front Line.” It tells the story of people living without electricity or gas, facing daily decisions about how to survive the coming week. In the summer of 2025, Suspilne Donbas collected accounts from residents of occupied Donetsk, where water is supplied once every three days.
Between these two articles lie three years of war and hundreds of thousands of publications about occupied territories. Yet stories like these are becoming increasingly rare. Occupation has not disappeared from Ukrainian media. But it is less and less often the subject of an article, and increasingly the backdrop against which something else happens.
The Research Centre of Detector Media NGO traced this shift. Analysts examined 397,004 publications across 5,737 national and local online media outlets mentioning occupied parts of Crimea, Sevastopol, and the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Kharkiv regions. For each year, they drew a random sample of 1,000 articles and manually coded them to determine whether occupation was the main subject or merely background context, and which narrative frame the media used to cover it.
Key findings from the report:
- Temporarily occupied territories are shifting from the main subject to the background. The share of publications in which occupied territories were the main subject fell from 51.5% in 2022 to 21.1% in 2025. Meanwhile, the share in which they served as a backdrop or context for other topics rose to 78.9%.
- Temporarily occupied territories increasingly appear in the context of warfare and diplomacy. The share of articles covering attacks on targets in occupied territories, with occupation itself in the background, increased from 6.8% to 17.1%. The share mentioning these territories in the context of peace negotiations rose from 4.7% to 13.3%. The report links this trend to the growing tendency to cover occupied territories through military updates, operations by Ukraine’s Defence Forces, and negotiations.
- The everyday lives of people under occupation are becoming less visible. The share of articles focusing directly on living conditions in temporarily occupied territories fell from 4% in 2022 to 1.9% in 2025, while those focusing on reintegration declined from 3.6% to 0.1%. Meanwhile, residents of occupied territories often remain faceless in national media: their experiences are more frequently recounted by officials, spokespersons, and civil society organizations than by residents themselves.
- Occupation officials are far less likely to be the central figures in articles. The share of publications focusing on occupation and built around these officials’ statements fell almost tenfold, from 12.7% in 2022 to 1.3% in 2025. Their statements increasingly appear within broader articles about human rights, collaboration with occupying authorities, or attacks on infrastructure.
- Different occupied territories have distinct media contexts. The deportation of children remains prominent in coverage of the Kherson region; education, militarization, and infrastructure problems feature in coverage of the Luhansk region; and human rights and repression are prominent in the Zaporizhzhia region. Sevastopol stands out for coverage of mobilization, strikes, and resistance. For example, the share of articles focusing directly on the deportation of children in the Kherson region rose from 9.7% in 2023 to 10.1% in 2024.
- Temporarily occupied territories have not disappeared from Ukrainian media. The number of outlets publishing articles that mention occupied territories remains relatively stable, ranging from 2,900 to 3,666 per year. However, the pool of newsrooms and journalists covering the subject consistently and in greater depth than individual news items and rewrites remains small.
Further details on the research methodology, changes in individual topics, regional differences, and recommendations for the media are available in the full report.
Download the full report in PDF format here.
This analytical report is supported by the Partnership Fund for a Resilient Ukraine (PFRU), funded by aid from the governments of Canada, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The content of this report is the sole responsibility of Detector Media NGO and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Programme and/or of its Financing Partners.
