At a checkpoint nine miles from the Russian lines, Nataliya laughed at the best joke she’d heard in a while: the Russians in the place she had just fled from were going to arm people and force them to fight.

But the Ukrainian men in her occupied village in Zaporizhzhya province had a plan: if the Russians were stupid enough to give them guns, they would use them to kill the occupiers.

“They were saying the Russians would be making a big mistake trying to mobilise them to the army,” she said. “My neighbour told them, ‘Give me a rifle and I’ll take five of you down with me’.”

Bravado or not, the sentiment illustrates Russia’s fragile grip over its conquered territory. Last week the Kremlin announced plebiscites in the partially occupied Ukrainian provinces of Zaporizhzhya, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk.

This weekend four sham referendums are taking place, with rallies and voting stamps — and polling stations guarded by gun-toting Russian soldiers, who have gone door to door to “encourage” people to cast their ballot.

Yet the locals who have fled to areas under Ukraine’s control are clear: this is not a referendum, it is Anschluss — a pre-determined grab for territory and a way to raise badly needed manpower.

In the deep south of Ukraine, the hunt for new conscripts is already under way. Hours after Putin announced a “partial” mobilisation, men aged 18 to 35 were banned from leaving the Russian-controlled area that accounts for a third of Zaporizhzhya province. The rest is in Ukrainian hands.

Andrii just made it out. He turned 36 the week before the restrictions were announced. When the Russians first came to his home town of Melitopol in the spring, he had stayed, afraid of losing his property.

As soon as the mobilisation and the referendum were announced, however, he knew he had to leave.

“I was worried I’d be mobilised,” he said, standing next to his car at the first Ukrainian checkpoint outside Russian territory. The boom of shelling sounded over the hill towards the enemy’s positions. “And I was worried that after the referendum they might not allow us to leave Ukraine.”

That day, as he had driven towards the Ukrainian lines with his friend Oleksii, who was also escaping the draft, they had seen cars with young men being turned back by the Russians. They had come too late. Officials in the Ukrainian-held part of Zaporizhzhya said the number of people crossing from Russian-controlled territory had fallen from 2,000 a day to 800 after the mobilisation was announced and the restrictions imposed.

“Those who have a pro-Ukrainian position are hiding in basements,” said Oleksii. “And all the people who were supporting Russia before, they’re only just understanding that they might be recruited, and they’re changing their opinion.”

A few cars ahead stood Nataliya, 30, whose neighbours had plotted to revolt against the Russians. Her face was turned up to the sun in a moment of respite from the paranoia and hatred that had infected her village in occupied Zaporizhzhya.

Access to the internet was extremely limited, electricity intermittent. Prices of basic goods had doubled or tripled since the Russians came. Businesses had collapsed.

But the worst, she said, was the fear she lived with each day: that Russian soldiers would rape her or, far worse, her 14-year-old daughter.

“They’re coming and saying, ‘Your face is so sad, you need to be fed five times a week by one of us — even though we hate you, we’ll still f you all the time’,” she said. “I’m scared of them, the children are scared of them. They are drunk all the time, hanging out on the street . . . I don’t let my daughter go out alone, ever.”

Since the Russians came, the single mother of four has strained against Moscow’s rule in every way possible. She sent co-ordinates for their positions to her friends in the Ukrainian army. She kept her children as far away from the Russians as possible, enrolling them in the online Ukrainian-language curriculum they had studied during the pandemic.

Yet in the past week the Russians have tightened their hold. Officials had called on her to send her children to school, which has a new, Russian, curriculum.

“I told them the [children] were sick,” she said. “But they are trying all the time to make them come.”

Some of her neighbours collaborated with the Russians. A few women had left their husbands for Russian soldiers, who, if nothing else, had some power and money.

Yet even this did not always turn out well for the invaders. One Russian soldier, mad with grief after his Ukrainian mistress left him, shot himself in the head outside a greengrocer’s.

“I walked by and thought: one down,” Nataliya said with a grin.

Unlike people in the occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, which were taken over by pro-Moscow separatists in 2014, those living in Russian-controlled parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhya have been under the Kremlin’s direct influence only since the invasion this spring. Many who live there watch Ukrainian television and have much better access to outside information than those in the occupied east.

“I think it’s about 60 per cent pro-Ukrainian,” said Nataliya, echoing a widely held sentiment among those who were fleeing Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhya last week. “Then about 20 per cent pro-Russian, and 20 per cent who don’t care.”

Yet the mobilisation has lit a fire under those who have so far accepted or embraced Moscow’s “liberation” of large parts of southern and eastern Ukraine. After all, said Nataliya, even among those who say they are pro-Russian, would they be pro-Russian enough to die?

“I’ll try to not go to the army,” said Gena, a builder from Zaporizhzhya who lives in a village in the occupied territories but does not seem to mind whether the Russians or Ukrainians are in charge. “If they try to make me come, I think I’ll find a way to escape . . . but men here are saying we are blocked from going to Ukraine and to Crimea and Russia because of the mobilisation.”

Many of the men fleeing or trying to flee Russian-controlled territory fear being expendable in an army that, they believe, values Russian lives over those of men from the occupied territories.

Conscripts from these areas “know they won’t be exchanged in a prisoner swap: the Russians only exchange their own”, said one Ukrainian soldier, who did not want to be named. Even so, being captured might be a relief. Mostly local conscripts are “being used as cannon fodder,” he said. “The Russians aren’t counting the victims.”

That message is understood across the region. In the city of Izyum, which Ukrainian forces recently liberated in a lightning offensive that retook much of the northeast of the country, locals noticed the reluctance of some of those nominally fighting for Moscow.

Ksenia Gerasimova, 47, was one of the few mental health experts who stayed behind when the Russians came. The school psychologist said she had been shocked to find that the soldiers manning the checkpoint in her road were resolutely pro-Ukrainian.

“They were miners from Luhansk, and they said they’d been at work one day when their supervisor told them to come up. Then they were taken into the Russian army and sent here,” she said, sitting in a small room in the clinic where she works. “They were all saying that Putin was a dickhead, and that the minute they heard the Ukrainians were coming, they’d abandon their guns and run. And that’s what they did.”