The research on the politics of Russian-led  “reconstruction” in occupied Mariupol can be approached from different points of entry. One might wonder about the construction workers present in the city: how did they end up there, who are they, and what are the everyday experiences of cohabiting the space among the occupiers, the occupied and racialized workers. Another point of interest could be the extended infrastructure of the Russian “reconstruction” project, specifically the building materials used in construction and the logistics of their delivery. One example would be the German company Knauf supplying materials to Russian-occupied Mariupol. Both points of inquiry can be aptly characterized by what Svitlana Matviyenko, Sitora Rooz, and D. Vincent describe in their recent text on technologies of Russian colonialism as “technologies of implication.” They define such technologies through the way the Russian Federation “weaponizes colonial dependencies,”  for instance, by recruiting workers from Central Asian countries to rebuild Russian-occupied cities. This technology enables the empire to “reproduce itself by implicating the subject in its murderous regimes, making solidarity impossible.” 

In this text, my starting point is the infrastructure “reconstruction” projects initiated by the Russian authorities. I aim to examine specific practices, such as the “patronage” program within the broader reconstruction project, and the production of “humanitarianized“ subjectivity as part of this process. This text is, in a way, a testing ground: some aspects have been left out due to a central question I’m grappling with—how can I write about the reification of Mariupol’s residents through Russian media without contributing to that reification as a researcher? How do I draw a clear line between sources deemed “proper” and everyday conversations with those still living there? I don’t know yet; however, I have noticed that I’ve started asking fewer questions, and N. has begun sharing less about the place where she is. Was it because I stopped asking questions,or was it her answers that started to shrink?

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In the occupied territories of Ukraine, “a man with a machine gun has been replaced by a man in a construction helmet”, as pro-Kremlin media outlet Rossiyskaya Gazeta wrote in August 2022 in an article dedicated to the newly established practice of “patronage”. This practice means that Russian regions and cities “established patronage” of Ukrainian cities and major industrial objects, currently occupied by the Russian Federation. For instance, Saint Petersburg took patronage over Mariupol, Moscow over Luhansk and Donetsk, the Republic of Tatarstan over Lysychansk, Khabarovsk Region over Debaltseve. Based on media reports, “patronage” involves Russian regions being assigned to oversee and conduct the construction and reconstruction of apartment buildings, social infrastructure, and critical infrastructure in Russian-occupied cities, including roads, schools, kindergartens, hospitals, and heating and water systems. As part of the “patronage” system, not only are construction workers being sent from the Russian Federation, but also middle and lower-level managerial staff, whose salaries increase when they work in the occupied territories of Ukraine. To generalize, “patronage” operates in two ways: by directly controlling decision-making processes regarding housing and infrastructure rebuilding, demolition, or construction, and by managing ideology in educational and cultural facilities of the occupied territories of Ukraine.

In this essay, I follow Lauren Berlant, a scholar of literary and critical theory, in their understanding of infrastructure. Berlant describes infrastructure as “the living mediation of what organizes life: the lifeworld of structure”, which “is defined by the movement or patterning of social form”. Infrastructure thus includes “roads, bridges, schools, food chains, finance systems, prisons, families, districts, norms all the systems that link ongoing proximity to being in a world-sustaining relation”. Berlant’s understanding of infrastructure is instructive here, as it includes infrastructure that organizes daily life, such as hospitals, schools, and social services, or, in other words, all the spaces where life primarily unfolds, along with the networks of relationships it fosters or destroys.

Thus, the infrastructure, whether already built, merely planned, or in the process of construction, is neither neutral nor apolitical. In occupied Mariupol, Russian infrastructure projects serve a dual purpose: as Christina Schwenkel notes, they can act as a biopolitical tool by tracking locals’ interactions with technosocial systems. As a result, local residents and their activities become visible to the Russian state, allowing it, according to Schwenkel, “to penetrate the most intimate spheres of people’s daily lives and observe their behavior.”

Simultaneously, it serves as a site for producing a humanitarized subjectivity.  Political theorist Hagar Kotef, writing on the gender aspects of violence and humanitarian politics in the context of Israel’s occupation of Gaza,  explains that this framework for subjectivation establishes “a regime which mediates both terror, rendering everyone killable, and humanitarianism, which renders savable, but always only savable.” The subject who emerges from humanitarian practices, according to Kotef, is a “a thin subject, which is but its own survival.”.

While Russia’s strategy during the siege of Mariupol could be described as “forced demodernization” through targeting life-sustaining infrastructure—part of what some researchers refer to as “urbicide”—then the reconstruction of infrastructure has been framed in pro-Russian media mainly as modernization and development. Thus, the Russian occupation is sustained through what urban geographer Omar Jabary Salamanca describes as “infrastructures structured by development and humanitarian practices,” where infrastructure “became a way of talking about the necessities of development without recourse to politics”. Infrastructure as humanitarian aid, then, becomes a medium of settler-colonial politics, stripping away the political dimension of “reconstruction” under occupation. The production of humanitarized subjectivity and the stripping away of the political from the Russian reconstruction projects are inherently connected processes, with each sustaining the other. To put this another way, we primarily see the residents of the city through footage produced by Russian propaganda actors, where Mariupol residents are consistently depicted as passive recipients of humanitarian aid, one form of which is infrastructure. This effect of subjectivization annihilates the political agency of Mariupol residents, who are consistently reified in pro-Russian media and presented as, building on Kotef, “always only savable”.

For further reading

Vlada Vazheyevskyy. (2024, July 23). Russian Military Builders, an Extension of and an Efficient Tool for the Settler Colonial State. UNITED24 Media.

References

Berlant, L. (2016). The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34(3), 393–419.

Graham, S. (2005). Urban metabolism as target: Contemporary war as forced demodernization. In Heynen, Kaika, & Swyngedouw (Eds.), In the Nature of Cities. Routledge.

Kotef, H. (2010). Objects of Security: Gendered violence and securitized humanitarianism in occupied Gaza. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 30(2), 179–191.

Pertsev, A. (2022, July 8). “Another way to demonstrate loyalty”: Meduza unravels the Kremlin’s pricey ‘patronage’ scheme for rebuilding the Donbas. Meduza.

Rooz, S., Vincent, E., & Matviyenko, S. (2024, August 21). Technologies of Russian Colonialism: Occupation, Persistence, Implication. The Funambulist. 

Salamanca, O. J. (2016). Assembling the fabric of life: When settler colonialism becomes development. Journal of Palestine Studies, 45(4), 64–80.

Schwenkel, C. (2018). The Current Never Stops: Intimacies of energy infrastructure in Vietnam. In N. Anand, A. Gupta, & H. Appel (Eds.), The Promise of Infrastructure. Duke University Press.

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