A brand new condominium within the Mirapolis advanced comes with panoramic views of town. The property
developer boasts easy accessibility to outlets and colleges, with vibrant mock-ups displaying households and
manicured gardens. “When you’ve been serious about proudly owning your personal condominium by the ocean,” it says,
“now could be the very best alternative to understand your dream.” Costs vary from about €75,000 to €110,000.
The Mirapolis property is only one of many “new” residential housing complexes underneath building
throughout Mariupol, the Ukrainian port metropolis subjected to a few of the worst horrors of Russia’s
invasion.
When the condominium blocks that initially stood right here had been bombed in March 2022, the residents of
Constructing 127 sheltered within the basement. Youngsters had been among the many 90 folks killed within the assault,
in keeping with Mariupol’s Destruction and Victims
Map, which has documented the devastation throughout town. At a close-by burial floor, graves
had been marked with crosses comprised of scrap wooden.
Credit score: REUTERS
The 4 high-rises on the western fringe of Mariupol had been destroyed, after which torn down. Now, they
are being rebuilt.
Credit score: REUTERS
Throughout the street is the brand new Nevsky residential property, one of many websites pro-Kremlin media has used to
paint an image of life returning to regular in Mariupol, which has been underneath Russian occupation for
greater than three years. In a video of Russian president Vladimir Putin assembly residents within the
neighbourhood in 2023, a lady within the background will be heard shouting. “That is all a lie!”
The broken buildings had been leveled by 2024.
Credit score: Google Earth / Maxar, Google Earth / Airbus
A Bellingcat investigation has recognized 23 multi-storey housing complexes — greater than 50
buildings with a minimum of 6,000 residences – being constructed within the ashes of Mariupol and marketed
on the market, with low rate of interest loans, to Russian residents. Building of the primary buildings
has been accomplished; new residents have already moved in. In the meantime, lots of the authentic
Ukrainian homeowners can not return dwelling.
Satellite tv for pc imagery exhibits the buildings earlier than Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. By the
summer time of 2024, all had been demolished, with some already being rebuilt.
Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, minutes after
Vladimir Putin introduced the beginning of a “particular army operation” on state tv.
Credit score: Al Jazeera
The strategically necessary southeastern metropolis of Mariupol was surrounded inside days. Houses and
infrastructure had been shelled.
Credit score: Related Press
The Russian bombardment lower meals, water, energy and warmth to the besieged metropolis. Web and cellphone
traces went down.
Credit score: REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko
Most of Mariupol’s 430,000 residents had been pressured to flee.
Credit score: REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko
By the point the brutal 86-day siege ended, an estimated 25,000 folks had been killed,
together with 1000’s who died when their properties had been bombed. Many are buried in mass
graves. The United Nations mentioned
90 % of Mariupol’s residential buildings had been broken or destroyed.
As a part of its post-siege reconstruction of the coastal metropolis, Russia deployed employees to
demolish what was left.
And to rebuild. Within the months after Mariupol was razed, the brand new authorities launched a
plan
to “restore” town and develop its inhabitants to 500,000 over the subsequent decade.
It’s a part of the Russification of Mariupol: streets have been renamed, Ukrainian monuments
eliminated, and murals painted over. Entry to Ukrainian web sites has been blocked and Russian
programmes are proven on tv. Mariupol and St Petersburg are actually “twin cities”.
Russia is portray an image of a metropolis restored, however many locals nonetheless stay in perilous
circumstances, together with some in half-destroyed buildings.
Credit score: REUTERS/Sergei Ilnitsky
“A Step right into a Shiny Future”
The most important of the 23 developments is the Leningrad Quarter, a 10-minute drive from the shore of the
Sea of Azov. The sprawling residential advanced, in Mariupol’s north-east, consists of a minimum of 11
high-rises together with automotive parking, recreation areas and youngsters’s playgrounds. Final week, one other
section of the mission was launched, with 4 new condominium blocks listed on-line. “We’re constructing
the way forward for Russia!” the web site for the event says. The residences are listed on the market with
“preferential
mortgages” at a 2 % rate of interest over 30 years with Russian banks. Mortgage charges in
Russia are, on common, about 20 %.
Rewind three years. The Leningrad Quarter was a web site of demise and destruction. Folks fell from
their home windows when the unique constructing at 81 Metallurgist Avenue was shelled and engulfed in
flames, in keeping with posts in a Telegram channel that documented the lives misplaced right here. A
great-grandmother was killed when her condominium in Constructing 77 burned, her household mentioned. One other
girl died whereas hiding within the basement of Constructing 121. “Forgive me, mum, for not saving you,” her
daughter wrote. Close to Constructing 83, somebody posted a photograph of a 36-year-old girl’s grave, with recent
flowers and a makeshift plaque. “I don’t understand how she died,” they mentioned.
Credit score: TASS
Residents who survived the siege of Mariupol, or have since returned to the captured metropolis, face the
problem of discovering someplace to stay. How can they show possession when property data are
lacking or have been destroyed? To assert their dwelling within the occupied territory – to forestall an “ownerless” property from
being confiscated – they need to change into Russian residents and current, in individual, with possession
paperwork.
Credit score: Mariupol’s Destruction and Victims Map
Some residents – together with the individuals who lived within the authentic Soviet-era buildings on the
Leningrad web site – have posted movies to social media, cautiously interesting to Putin and the
Russian-installed authorities in Mariupol to intervene.
“We don’t have the chance to purchase the housing with [a] mortgage, as many people are
pensioners or have misplaced virtually every part,” one girl mentioned. One other mentioned: “In 2022 we
misplaced housing, property, and many people additionally our family members.”
Residents complain about being unable to maneuver again to the websites the place they used to stay, and
say they had been misled about entry to compensatory housing. They are saying many individuals throughout the
metropolis are nonetheless homeless or pressured to hire.
Those that can show property possession say the monetary compensation being provided is at a
price far decrease than market worth. Authorities have mentioned they may compensate residents who
misplaced their properties within the conflict, however that is capped at about €12,000 for
a one-person family and €16,000 for a two-person household. The most cost effective flats marketed in
the rebuilt condominium blocks begin at about €45,000 for a 20m2 studio.
“We aren’t asking for favours, however for adherence to the legislation and guarantees made,” one girl
mentioned. “We ask to be given the housing we had been promised, not a proposal of [a] mortgage to our
personal home or somebody’s ‘ownerless’ condominium.”
It’s not solely folks from the reconstructed high-rises marketed on the market who’re impacted. In a single
video, a lady will be heard sobbing as she movies the hollowed-out shell of a constructing on the western
fringe of Mariupol. This condominium block was demolished however has not been rebuilt.
For Viktoriia Moreva, who lived on the primary flooring of the constructing, there’s nothing to return to.
Moreva was in a good friend’s dwelling close by when airstrikes hit her dwelling in March 2022. She watched it
burn.
“We simply couldn’t perceive it, why the shelling began with the homes,” she
mentioned. “It was a quiet residential space. There was a college and two kindergartens in
this space. No troopers had been within the homes. Solely civilians.”
“Flagrant Violations of Worldwide Legislation”
Professor Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN’s Particular Rapporteur on the correct to satisfactory housing, mentioned
Russia’s assaults on properties and residential areas in Mariupol had been “grave conflict crimes and crimes
in opposition to humanity”.
He instructed Bellingcat that the size and depth of destruction, mass displacement of residents and
deaths of civilians constituted “probably the most flagrant violations of worldwide legislation” and had been
“akin to a few of the worst examples from World Struggle II”.
“Mass destruction of properties throughout battle as in Mariupol are acts of ‘domicide’, as I proposed to the UN Common Meeting
in 2022, and should represent conflict crimes, crimes in opposition to humanity and even genocide, relying on
details,” he mentioned.
Professor Rajagopal mentioned the housing coverage measures applied by Russia had been opposite to the
primary guidelines of worldwide legislation, such because the prohibition in opposition to taking non-public property throughout
occupation underneath the legal guidelines of conflict, together with the Hague laws.
“What seems to be occurring is in actual fact an annexation of Ukrainian territory, by occupation
and creation of latest property rights which excludes the previous homeowners,” he mentioned. “Declaring a
property ‘ownerless’ or ‘deserted’ in an effort to annex it’s an previous colonial authorized trick that settler
colonial states have used for lots of of years when such property, normally belonging to native
populations, was declared ‘terra nullius’ (no individual’s land) in an effort to purchase it, however is
thought of to be fully opposite to trendy worldwide legislation.”
“What Russia is making an attempt is to return to medieval practices and discredited norms comparable to ‘terra
nullius’ that Russia itself, as a part of the Soviet Union, actively opposed for many years.”
A 2023 evaluation by the Kyiv College of Economics estimated the harm to Ukraine’s housing inventory to
be nearly $56 billion. Mariupol was one of many worst-affected cities: Ukrainian authorities mentioned
greater than 11,000 properties had been destroyed and tens of 1000’s extra had been broken. Half of the two,600
multi-storey residential buildings had been decreased to rubble.
Credit score: REUTERS
Over a big block that was decimated in central Mariupol, seven separate residential complexes are
nearing completion. Amongst them are 4 gemstone-named developments starting from 9 to fifteen storeys.
Three condominium blocks within the centre of the “resort city” – the Residence I, Residence II, and
Residence III – are on account of be accomplished by the top of the 12 months.
Like the opposite estates analysed by Bellingcat, these residences are listed on Russian actual property
web sites with low-interest loans.
The ads goal households with youngsters: “The whole lot is shut by: the ocean, a park, colleges,
medical services and a church,” says one for the brand new Residence III. They don’t present what was right here
earlier than.
The tree-lined road the place Residence III now stands grew to become a graveyard in the course of the siege.
Credit score: REUTERS / Alexander Ermochenko
A brief stroll away is Hospital No. 3, the kids’s and maternity hospital bombed by Russian forces
on March 9, 2022. “The whole lot was destroyed in a single second,” mentioned Elena Karas, a nurse who was caring
for 13 untimely infants on the third flooring. “I didn’t ever assume they may bomb our hospital. Not a
hospital. You’ll assume it’s a secure place,” she
instructed The New York Occasions.
Ukrainian authorities mentioned three folks had been killed and greater than a dozen others had been injured within the
assault, which President Volodymyr Zelensky mentioned was proof of genocide.
Iryna Kalinina, the wounded pregnant girl on this {photograph}, and her unborn child – named Miron,
that means “peace” – each died.
Credit score: Related Press / Evgeniy Maloletka
Throughout the street from the hospital, building employees are constructing the Horizon advanced, two
“consolation class” high-rises on account of be completed by 2026.
A block behind the positioning is the Cypress advanced. The residential constructing that initially stood right here
was bombed and later torn down. Commercials for Cypress – “a brand new vacation spot for individuals who worth
status, consolation, and reliability” – tout the 15-storey constructing’s proximity to Hospital No. 3.
On March 16, 2022, a Russian airstrike hit
Mariupol’s drama theatre.
The grand Soviet-era constructing had change into town’s major bomb shelter, with lots of of civilians
looking for refuge inside. Exterior, the phrase “CHILDREN” had been spelled out on the bottom in big
Cyrillic letters. As many as 600 folks reportedly
died within the assault.
Credit score: Google Earth / Airbus
Lower than 500m from the theatre is the unique web site of the Home with the Clock, a historic
landmark within the metropolis’s centre. Famous for its clock tower, the 1950’s constructing served as a gathering
place for town’s residents.
Within the months earlier than Russia’s invasion, its facade had been restored and a brand new clock put in.
Credit score: Home with the Clock / Google Maps
The constructing was shelled in the course of the siege and demolished after Mariupol fell.
Credit score: Mariupol’s Destruction and Victims Map
A brand new multi-storey advanced with studio, one- and two-bedroom residences was constructed on the positioning in
late 2024. “The Home with the Clock was a recognisable image of Mariupol, however was broken throughout
the conflict,” the property developer’s web site says.
As is the case with most new complexes analysed by Bellingcat, its authentic deal with was modified
underneath occupation – a tactic Mariupol’s residents say additional complicates their declare to housing. The
Home with the Clock was on Myru Avenue – “Avenue of Peace”. The street has since been renamed Lenin
Avenue, after the previous Soviet chief.
Farther east is the Azovstal Iron and Metal Works plant, the place Mariupol’s final defenders surrendered on Might 20, 2022.
Credit score: Cowl Media by way of REUTERS
Past the Azovstal steelworks are 4 new residential developments: the Olympic, Left Financial institution,
Zhukova and Designer’s Home Mari, a seven-storey “business-class” advanced “impressed by the sandy
coast”.
The bombed-out constructing seen on this footage is the place Designer’s Home Mari is being constructed.
Credit score: Protection of Ukraine
Polished ads for the brand new constructing present it’ll function landscaped courtyards and a
24-hour concierge service. Costs for a two-bedroom condominium are listed for about €130,000.
Ukrainian journalist Mstyslav Chernov and his Related Press colleagues had been trapped in Mariupol
in the course of the first weeks of the siege.
The final worldwide journalists to stay within the metropolis, they captured
a few of the most defining – and haunting – photos of the conflict.
The crew reported from throughout the charred metropolis, together with in Mariupol’s north-west, close to the brand new
655-apartment Mirapolis advanced. On this space, 4 new complexes are additionally underneath building.
“That is the place your story begins,” a web site for the Azure Coasts improvement says. Among the many folks
killed right here in March 2022 was an aged man. “He lies there underneath the rubble,” his granddaughter
posted on Telegram.
An condominium constructing on Kuprina Avenue guarantees its new residents “consolation, safety and
affordability”. A video filmed close by after the unique buildings had been bombed exhibits unburied our bodies
on the grass, rigorously wrapped in sheets.
Credit score: Mariupol’s Destruction and Victims Map
Maple Alley, a posh with 10 condominium blocks, is featured in a Russian YouTube video with the
caption: “Dreaming of an condominium by the ocean with a preferential mortgage?” It’s being constructed the place
a mom and her son had been buried with their neighbours in the course of the siege.
Credit score: Mariupol’s Destruction and Victims Map
This high-rise, marketed as having youngsters’s playgrounds and being near a kindergarten, is on
Troyiczka Avenue, which has been renamed to commemorate the USSR.
Credit score: Mariupol’s Destruction and Victims Map
