Russia intensifies plunder in policy to bring in Russians and eliminate Ukrainian identity in occupied Ukraine
In all areas that have fallen under Russian occupation, Russia has aggressively foisted its citizenship on the local population, with one of the methods used being the threat of otherwise being stripped of their property. It now appears that even those who agreed to take Russian passports can still find themselves homeless.
Petro Andriushchenko, Director of the Occupation Research Centre and former Adviser to the Mayor of Mariupol, has spoken of the “total plundering of Mariupol residents”, and says that the number of apartments that are sealed (as ‘ownerless’) despite having owners is increasing on a daily basis. The situation, moreover, is “surreal”, with people having taken on Russian citizenship because they were told that this was needed if they were to save their apartments. They had stood in thousands of queues, from morning till night, in order to ‘re-register’ their property under Russian legislation, only to find that they are again told that they are homeless. Even for Russia, Andriushchenko says, that should be excessive, yet it is the reality of the aggressor state’s so-called ‘Russian world’.
Andriushchenko posts a video in which a woman now living in Mariupol is standing outside the apartment in which she lived for 30 years, and which her husband obviously lived in all his life, until his death in 2022. The occupation housing authority are, however, refusing to hand over the keys. Nor is she the only victim. The Ukrainian publication 0629.com.ua has scrutinized the latest list of supposedly ‘ownerless’ apartments issued on 4 April by the Mariupol occupation ‘administration’, and says that there are a number of apartments whose owners are currently living in them. One of the people they spoke with does want to try to establish his property rights through the ‘courts’, but first needs to raise the money to do so.
The new list contains over 300 apartments, with similar lists being drawn up in all parts of Ukraine, except Crimea, under Russian occupation. Although Russia made it equally impossible to live in occupied Crimea without Russian citizenship, the Kremlin was slower to introduce measures that prevented Ukrainian property owners from keeping their land without a Russian passport. Since 2022, all pretence has been dropped, with the measures of effective plunder considerably quicker and more aggressive.
The list in occupied Mariupol gives people 30 days to turn up in person and challenge the categorization of the property as ‘ownerless’. The refusal to accept a person’s legal representative simplifies the Russian plunder since a huge number of Ukrainians were forced to flee after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As reported earlier, human rights groups have advised Ukrainians in such a position to not return to occupied territory. There is a real danger that they can end up seized and sentenced to huge terms of imprisonment on fabricated charges. Even if that does not happen, the so-called re-registration is legally meaningless and invalid in Ukraine.
It is also increasingly the case that Ukrainians trying to return to their own homes on temporarily occupied territory are prevented from doing so. In the summer of 2024, RIA-Melitopol spoke with Ukrainians from Melitopol (in the part of Zaporizhzhia oblast under Russian occupation since 2022). They had tried to return to Melitopol via Moscow and Sheremetyevo airport. They reported that in the form they were required to fill in, there were questions about property which needed to be answered in exhaustive detail, even down to shares in relatives’ apartments. “And, as a rule, the owners of particularly choice sites, such as shops or good apartments, are sent back [to where they flew in from]”. The FSB checked people’s answers about property with computer data, and any attempt to not mention something was used as pretext for immediate ‘deportation’. There are grounds for believing, RIA-Melitopol believes, that the FSB at Sheremetyevo have been given a list of the property which the invaders have set their eye on.
On 7 April, Ivan Fedorov, Head of the Zaporizhzhia Regional Administration, reported that the Russian invaders have been carrying out plunder on occupied territory for the past three years, with the latest method being ‘auctions’ of land illegally appropriated and supposedly ‘nationalized’.
One of the motives, Fedorov says, is to get rid of Ukrainians deemed ‘disloyal [to Russia]’ and to replace them with mercenaries who fought Russia’s war against Ukraine, or ‘specialists’, brought in from Russia.
None of this is new. In May 2024, the East Human Rights Group reported that Russian military were being allocated land plots on occupied territory, with the land in question illegally placed on Russia’s register of ‘confiscated land’. Some two thousand land plots had, back then, been illegally allocated since the beginning of 2023. The amount is now, doubtless, much higher.
If earlier figures cited, such as the plan to import at least 10 thousand Russian ‘specialists’ and their families to occupied Zaporizhzhia oblast, were fairly modest, Petro Andriushchenko has cited other numbers that suggest that Russia is determined to totally change the demographic makeup of occupied territory. He reported on 6 April that Russia is planning to move at least five million Russians on occupied Ukrainian territory by 2030. That figure could be extrapolated from the plans announced at a forum in Rostov, entitled ‘integration 25’, which spoke of the population of all occupied territory, except Crimea, reaching ten million by 2030. According to Andriushchenko, the number at present cannot exceed five million, with the others clearly to be brought in from Russia.
This is part of Russia’s clear and extremely aggressive attempts to eradicate Ukrainian identity on occupied territory and to imprison or get rid of Ukrainians viewed as ‘too Ukrainian’. As reported, on 25 March 2025, Russian leader Vladimir Putin issued a decree according to which Ukrainian citizens living in their own country will face deportation if they have not taken Russian citizenship. Judging by the huge number of arrests of Ukrainians from occupied territory, including those who have taken Russian citizenship, on insane ‘spying’ / ‘treason’ charges, it would seem that all Ukrainians are to some degree viewed as ‘unreliable’ – unlike the traitors willing to collaborate with the aggressor state and the convicted criminals and other mercenaries whom Russia uses to fight its war against Ukraine.
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