After Russia’s bloody 86-day siege of Mariupol, which damaged or destroyed up to 90 percent of the Ukrainian city’s residential buildings, residents who still had a home counted themselves lucky.
But their luck may be running out.
Under a new Russian law, the authorities in Mariupol, which has been occupied by Russia for four years, are threatening to seize property from owners who do not obtain a Russian title deed. The requirement, human rights advocates say, is intended to cement Russian domination of the occupied territories and cast doubt on Ukraine’s territorial claims in the future.
The new rules imposed on Ukrainians, rights advocates say, are deliberately onerous, leading to theories that Moscow wants to steal Ukrainians’ homes and give them to Russians moving to the territories. If mass evictions occur, they could aggravate a serious housing shortage that contrasts sharply with the glossy picture that Moscow has painted of Mariupol under Russian control.
Yelena, a resident of the city who asked that her last name be withheld for security reasons, has no way to get a Russian deed. Her apartment is registered in her daughter’s name. Homeowners must apply for deeds in person, but when her daughter, who lives in Poland, tried to fly to Moscow in 2024 and then travel to Mariupol, she was stopped at the airport. She was designated a “security risk” and barred from entering Russia for 20 years.
“As long as my daughter cannot come here, she cannot register this property under the Russian law,” Yelena, 53, who has lived in the same Mariupol neighborhood all of her life, said in a telephone interview. “That means they could kick me out of my home any time now.”
It is unclear why her daughter was turned back, but Kseniya Kvitka, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that Russia often bars Ukrainians trying to return to deal with property matters.
The Kremlin has set out to make Mariupol a showcase of the “new territories” — its term for the occupied territories — and bury memories of the Russian Army’s relentless bombing of the city for more than two months in 2022 that killed thousands of Ukrainians.
Russia rebuilt and revamped the city center, including the Mariupol Drama Theater, which the Russian military struck in March 2022 even though the word “children” was written in large letters on the ground at either end of the building. It became a mass grave for an estimated 300 people.
In all, the Russian authorities have built about 5,000 new apartments. And with that, they have essentially declared Mariupol’s housing problems solved.
After 30 more residential blocks are refurbished this year, there will be nothing left for Russia to rebuild, Marat Khusnullin, a deputy prime minister and the point person for Mariupol reconstruction, told state television last month.
Yet homelessness or the threat of it persists, residents and rights groups say.
The rebuilding has been concentrated in high-visibility areas in Mariupol, a city that had a half-million people before the war and that now, according to the Russian authorities, has about 300,000. Some have called the reconstruction a Potemkin village, a stage for dramatic videos that portray Russia as an efficient caretaker — and that by extension aim to legitimize occupation.
When President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia made an unannounced visit to Mariupol in 2023 to meet residents who had moved into new apartments, an unidentified woman shouted to him in a rare unscripted moment: “It’s a lie! All of this is just for a show!” People who have been to Mariupol or moved there have said that much of the city feels empty.
In the city center, Ukrainian residents have been denied access to the new apartments if they do not obtain a Russian passport. Most of the units — 75 percent, according to a statement this week by an occupation development official — have been purchased by people from Russia, many of whom are lured to Mariupol by cheap mortgages.
In other parts of the city, buildings are too damaged to be lived in or have been razed and not rebuilt. Videos that Yelena shared with The New York Times showed the ruins of a stadium covered in snow, half-destroyed apartment blocks and empty lots with fallen trees.
Confidential complaints lodged with the Russian government and reviewed as part of a Times investigation late last year make it clear that many in Mariupol still do not have homes.
In one such complaint, which was among thousands on a variety of subjects that the government inadvertently posted online, a Mariupol resident said she had been waiting for compensation or new housing since 2022. But “the waiting list seems to be moving in the opposite direction,” she wrote.
The woman, whose name The Times is withholding for her protection, was pregnant at the time she filed her complaint last year. She said she was staying for now in a rental unit.
“Where am I supposed to take my child when he is born?” she wrote. “To a pit? Or a train station in Mariupol?”
She confirmed in an email exchange with The Times that she still had no home of her own.
Anna Murlykina, a news website editor who fled Mariupol for Kyiv, the capital, after the 2022 siege, said that thousands of people in Mariupol had no homes and were staying with friends or relatives.
“The only thing that keeps those people from openly revolting is fear of the brutal force wielded by security officers in the occupied territories,” Ms. Murlykina said.
Those who do have properties face a deadline of July to get a Russian passport and title deed. If they do not, the homes could be seized under the vaguely worded law that allows the occupation authorities to take over “residential buildings, apartments and rooms that appear to have been abandoned.” Mr. Putin signed the legislation in December.
Currently, the Mariupol authorities deem about 13,000 apartments to be “abandoned.” The city’s Russia-appointed mayor has said that plans are underway to hand the homes to some of the roughly 6,000 families on an official waiting list for housing. Many of the units are in the more desirable city center.
“People are very happy,” the mayor, Anton Koltsov, told Russian state media. “These are very nice homes,” he added.
But residents, including some who recorded appeals to Mr. Putin for his annual call-in show last year, say they are wary of moving into confiscated homes.
Occupation officials began moving to seize “ownerless” properties before the July deadline. Human Rights Watch identified some 8,000 court cases filed by the authorities across occupied Ukraine from March 2024 to January 2026 seeking to confiscate such properties.
“The ultimate goal is to force as many people as possible to become Russian citizens,” said Yulia Gorbunova, a senior researcher at the organization. “The speed with which this is happening is quite concerning because what Russia is trying to do is present this picture to the world as a fait accompli: This area is populated by people who accept our rule.”
It had already become difficult to live in Mariupol without a Russian passport, said Yelena, the woman facing eviction. Within a year of the occupation, she said, residents were supposed to show a Russian ID if they wanted to apply for a pension or receive medical help.
Some residents have spent thousands of dollars in legal fees trying to prove their home ownership.
Four years after the hostilities in Mariupol ended, Yana Ishutina and her mother still live in a refugee camp outside Moscow. The occupation authorities demolished their ruined nine-story apartment block a few miles west of the Mariupol city center but have not offered replacement housing.
It took Ms. Ishutina a year and a half to prove her ownership because the title deed burned inside the apartment. By the time she could file the paperwork, the occupation authorities had introduced new rules for compensation. Ms. Ishutina and her mother would now be eligible only for a studio or a one-bedroom, even though their previous home had been a two-bedroom.
Ms. Ishutina found odd jobs to cover legal fees and medical treatment for her mother as they stayed in the refugee camp. She recently learned that she was No. 376 on the city’s waiting list for housing.
In a series of messages from the camp, Ms. Ishutina sounded desperate and disillusioned with Russian control.
“I’ve grown to understand that they are not going to give us anything,” she said. “The city is building houses fit for mortgages and selling them to Russians.”
Mariupol has become a magnet for Russians looking for cheap homes — another way that Moscow is cementing its authority. An apartment with a sea view there costs a fraction of what a similar unit goes for in a Russian seaside city. Mariupol homes are eligible for a preferential 2 percent mortgage rate, while rates in Russia range from about 15 to 20 percent.
The city center, Yelena said, is bustling with Russians who are driving a real estate boom.
On the outskirts, she said, “we are second-class citizens here. My neighbors still live in a half-destroyed building. We are being pushed out and replaced.”
Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.
