The colonizers come to stay – invasion is a structure, not an event. 

Patrick Wolfe, 1999

Our reflections on the so-called reconstruction of Mariupol by the occupation authorities began with research into the destruction of the urban environment during the almost three-month-long siege of the city. Initially, we understood this process through the conceptual framework of ‘urbicide’, a term which seemed to accurately describe the violence inflicted against the city by the Russian army. This violence resulted in a critical level of destruction to the urban fabric, impacting 93% of the buildings in the central part of Mariupol and causing the complete collapse of the healthcare infrastructure and the deaths of at least 10,000 citizens.¹The data are provided by Human Rights Watch in a report published in February 2024. However, the destruction of Mariupol during the siege — while evident from the number of buildings that burned down — was never intended to erase the built environment. It was the violence aimed at destroying social ties that became the main means of embedding the city into the body of the empire.

Once Russia had fully captured the city, the occupation authorities started to build a new Mariupol — “a coastal city” that became a site for implementing the Russian capitalist imperial dream. Today, the renamed and patched-up streets of Mariupol, the sterile renderings of residential complexes, and the “reconstruction” plans of newly established Russian architectural institutions for the seized cities are hard to separate from the violence that was unleashed on the morning of 24 February 2022. We propose to look at the “reconstruction” of the city not only as an act of violence and destruction of urbanity, as such, but also as an instrument of imperialism that reveals its working principles.

This approach to “reconstruction” in the occupied territories has significance beyond the narrow context of Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities that have suffered significant damage. At the same time as many “reconstruction” activities in Mariupol are starting or coming to completion, similar processes may soon be underway in the devastated cities of Gaza. These contexts are connected not only in terms of their timelines but also in terms of the logic of the political violence that is inherent to both cases. In both instances, the invasion of territories ceases to be merely an event and instead becomes a system — one that does not simply “destroy to replace” (Wolfe, 2006) but expands the notion of destruction toward its polar opposite: reconstruction. By placing housing²Before the beginning of the war in 2014, Ukraine had a specific housing situation that was interconnected with the Soviet legacy and rapid economic transformation of the early 1990s. After Ukraine gained independence, most residential properties were privatized, granting legal ownership to the families who had lived in them during the Soviet period. These homes became the personal property of their residents. Although comprehensive data is limited, the State Statistics Service of Ukraine reported that, as of 2010, approximately 93% of Ukrainian households lived in homes they owned themselves. and land at the logical centre of these events, we hope to establish connections that will also help us build networks of solidarity and resistance to Russian and other forms of imperialism. 

Destruction through construction

For the occupation authorities, the reconstruction of Mariupol has become a special project, in which the reconstruction of housing and social infrastructure is presented as a means to resolve the humanitarian crisis in the city after its destruction. In the rhetoric of the occupation authorities, the complex social changes triggered in the city by the numerous acts of violence committed against its residents, and even the reinforcement of the occupation, are presented as things that could be resolved through architectural interventions. In reality, the new city emerging on the territory of Mariupol conceals its mechanisms for implementing the Russian Federation’s imperial policies — a bizarre framework of the empire, whose material form comprises building insulation materials, colourful playgrounds, brand-new white plastic windows, and paving slabs. – This framework is constructed on the foundation of the Russian bureaucratic system, which is constantly developing pseudo-legitimate instruments for the incorporation and absorption of newly seized Ukrainian territories.

In mid-February 2022, on the eve of the full-scale invasion, the Russian State Autonomous Institution “Research and Design Institute for Urban Planning of the City of Moscow” was restructured as the Federal Autonomous Institution “Unified Research and Design Institute for Spatial Planning of the Russian Federation”. As such, in 2022, the institution that had been responsible for projects dealing with public space in Moscow before the full-scale invasion, began to look beyond Russia’s borders to Ukrainian territories, referring to these as “new territories”, “new lands”, or “Little Russia”.³The terms “new territories”, “new regions”, or “new lands” (Russian: “новые территории”, “новые регионы” or “новые земли” respectively), referring to Ukrainian territories, often appear in the language of Russian media, bloggers, and real estate agents. However, this phrasing is not new to the Russian architecture and construction industry. There is a Russian design and consulting company called Novaia Zemlia (New Land), which develops master plans and urban construction regulations for Murmansk, Salekhard, and Ulan-Ude and whose employees work with companies such as DOM.RF . The DOM.RF company is also central to forming and implementing the state housing sector policy in Russia. It operates in several areas: mortgage lending, the rental housing market, issuing infrastructure bonds, and developing urban master plans. In the “Catalogue of new buildings” on the company’s website, one can find buildings in occupied Ukrainian territories. At the same time, the concept of “New Land” [Novaia zemlia] is primarily associated in Russia with an eponymous northern Russian archipelago that was used as a nuclear weapons testing site during Soviet times.
“Little Russia” is a concept that is firmly woven into Russian propaganda and serves to undermine the toponym “Ukraine”, and, as such, the history of Ukraine as an independent state. You can read more about this here. This concept is important as it relates to the “free economic zone” (FEZ) policy, which will be discussed in more detail later in this text. For instance, in the language of real estate agents in occupied Mariupol, one can often spot the distinction between Mariupol as a part of the “Little Russia” and the territory of the “Big Russia”. One of the first measures undertaken by this organisation in the occupied territories was to develop a concept plan for the centre of Mariupol, after which it expanded its work to define and visualise the future of Rubizhne, Lysychansk, and Siverskodonetsk.⁴Unlike other heavily damaged but smaller Ukrainian cities that Russia has occupied, such as Bakhmut or Avdiivka, around 90,000 of Mariupol’s original residents remained in the occupied city. It is for this reason that Russia has been particularly interested in reconstructing the city (by contrast, only around 1000 people remained in Avdiivka). In addition, Mariupol became hidden deep in the occupied territories, far from the front line and beyond the zone of threat where the Ukrainian army could attack. As the battlefield gradually shifts deeper into Ukrainian territory, as can be seen on the DeepState map, the list of projects undertaken by this state body is growing, forming an extensive database of how Russia envisions the future of the occupied Ukrainian cities.

The Mariupol master plan, developed by the same Federal Autonomous Institution, includes a vision for restoring the city and the adjacent villages of Talakivka, Sartana, Staryi Krym, Lomakyne, Kalynivka, and Hnutove. In addition to its declared intention to construct kindergartens and schools, to reopen universities, to open a branch of the Nakhimov Naval School, develop a railway, and to restore the metallurgical industry, the plan envisages the restoration of more than 1,700,000 m² of existing and the construction of 5,800 m² of new housing.

The materials of the Unified Research and Design Institute for Spatial Planning of the Russian Federation describe the territory of Mariupol, the condition of buildings, and the requirements for reconstruction, demolition and construction, restoration or rebuilding of residential areas. They mainly follow the previous structure of the city, slightly redrawing the lines of those wrecked housing blocks that are impossible to reconstruct. Importantly, however, the city, as it is presented in these materials, is divided into clusters, which, in turn, are divided into smaller zones that are distributed among Russian developers.

From the beginning, the Russian authorities and urban planners conceived the reconstruction of the city’s housing stock as the construction of “permanent housing” that could exactly replace what had been destroyed. Yet this approach never envisaged the construction of temporary housing for people who had lost their homes as a result of a direct hit or damage. The occupation authorities have never built temporary housing, camps for internally displaced persons, or similar kinds of accommodation. Having no opportunity to wait out the period between destruction and reconstruction, people began to leave inscriptions in Russian on intact buildings, such as “We are freezing. HELP” in the autumn of 2022.

The reconstruction of Mariupol is supported by economic measures that help to stabilise property investments in the occupied territories. Since June 2023, a “free economic zone” (hereafter, “FEZ”) has been established in the “DPR” and “LPR” (the illegal and unrecognised entities known as “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic”), as well as in the temporarily occupied territories of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts. In July, the FEZ was extended to include Crimea and the Russian border regions: the Belgorod, Kursk, Bryansk, Voronezh, and Rostov oblasts. The FEZ created special conditions for investment in the housing market in the occupied territories. One of its main mechanisms was the creation of “mortgages in the new regions of Russia”. These mortgages, provided by only three state-owned Russian banks — Promsvyazbank, RostFinance, and Sberbank — allow for a rate of up to 2% for the purchase of accommodation in new buildings in the occupied territories and in the Belgorod oblast of Russia. This mortgage rate is significantly lower than anywhere else in so-called “Big Russia”, where the average mortgage rate is 30 per cent. At the same time, in Rostov-on-Don, RostFinance bank offers mortgages for apartments in new buildings at 20.95%.

This gap makes housing in the occupied Ukrainian territories an attractive investment that is designed to entrench the occupation long term and encourage people from so-called “Big Russia” to sell their homes in Russian towns and move to the “new regions”. Luiza Nalyvai, owner of the real estate service Ajax-Mariupol, became one of the central figures in the real estate business in Mariupol after the occupation and was even nominated for the Russian Woman of the Third Millennium Award. In a video about the housing market in Mariupol, she remarked that demand for housing in the city grows month by month due to the mortgage policies: “We see a tendency across Russia for … real estate markets … to be sluggish [but] you can’t feel that in Mariupol. This is such a paradox. The real estate market in Mariupol is very active, with a natural monthly growth rate of about 15%”.⁵Walk&Talk. (2024, November 16). Квартиры в новостройках Мариуполя. Кто в основном покупает их сегодня? (“Apartments in new buildings of Mariupol. Who mainly buys them today?”) [Video]. YouTube.

This market situation encourages locals to sell their homes in Mariupol and leave the city, while the local population is being quickly replaced with “residents from Big Russia”. Anna Murlykina, a Mariupol resident forced to leave the city and editor-in-chief of one of the main independent news portals, 0629.com.ua, states: “Housing prices are now twice as high as before the occupation. That is, the Russians raised the cost per square metre: it’s so high that the average family can sell their apartment in devastated Mariupol and buy an apartment in Vinnytsia, for instance, in Mykolaiv, or Odesa.” Meanwhile, despite the rise in prices, newly built housing can be purchased “almost for free” due to the very low mortgage rate, according to Luiza Nalyvai: “[Residents of Big Russia react] immediately, even before the sales have opened. There is a three-level waiting list before the sales begin”.⁶Walk&Talk. (2024, November 16). Квартиры в новостройках Мариуполя. Кто в основном покупает их сегодня? (“Apartments in new buildings of Mariupol. Who mainly buys them today?”) [Video]. YouTube.

According to locals, the housing being built in Mariupol can be divided into two types: the housing for mortgage buyers and ‘compensatory housing’. While mortgage housing is available for purchase at market prices, compensatory housing is intended for residents of houses that are deemed irreparable as a result of the bombing. These residents include homeowners whose homes were included in the “Unified Register of Buildings and Structures Designated for Demolition” by the so-called Ministry of Construction and Housing of the ‘DNR’ during a series of inspections conducted by the occupation authorities in the city. The list included 527 buildings, most of which were residential. The demolition of those buildings freed up space for construction sites in “Russian Mariupol”, although the construction works that have already started in Mariupol suggest that most of this “newly freed land” is being distributed among private companies to create just the mortgage housing. Meanwhile, only some of the compensatory houses that are actually built end up being inhabited.⁷This process is also slowed down by red tape, which requires additional procedures to confirm ownership, as discussed below.

At the same time, a lot of compensatory housing is being built on the city’s outskirts, which has led residents who have lost their apartments in the city centre to complain about unfair compensation. On pro-Russian Telegram channels such as “Russian Mariupol”, moderators advise residents not to complain about the authorities but to ask for a quota for compensatory housing in commercial mortgage buildings, as they are supposedly built faster, more intensively, and with better materials. Thus, bizarre residential complexes are gradually being built into the city — such as Nevskyi, visited by Putin during his visit to Mariupol on 26 March 2023, or Myropolis, located on Lenin Avenue, as it has been renamed by Russians (the avenue used to be Myr Avenue (Peace Avenue) before the occupation). The latter project, which has not yet been built, was designed by the company Uspekh, which also develops the coastal areas of occupied Crimea.

Renderings of the Myropolis residential complex (Mariupol) by the company Uspekh

Renderings of the Apart-Complex “LETTO” (Alushta) by the company Uspekh

This construction fever in the city attracts new residents — in particular, through different kinds of labour migration, as builders who travel for work from distant regions of Russia such as Novosibirsk decide to stay in Mariupol.⁸Новости Сибири (“Siberia News”). (2023, September 22). Новосибирские строители восстановили еще один дом в Мариуполе (“Novosibirsk construction workers rebuilt another house in Mariupol”). Apart from job opportunities, the settler colonisers are interested in the city’s location by the sea and its climate. One settler in Mariupol, Anna, who moved with her family from the city of Kansk in Krasnoyarsk krai, said that the decision was made by her husband, who came to the city right after its occupation to work in construction.⁹Kozhevnikova, A. (2024, May 16). Переезд в Мариуполь из Красноярского края! (“Moving to Mariupol from Krasnoyarsk krai!”) [Video]. YouTube. Before the rest of the family joined him, Anna’s husband told her: “‘I’m never coming back to our city. … I really fell in love with this city, the climate … is so important to me.’ “He grew very fond of the locals”, she adds.¹⁰Kozhevnikova, A. (2024, May 16). Переезд в Мариуполь из Красноярского края! (“Moving to Mariupol from Krasnoyarsk krai!”) [Video]. YouTube. After the move, Anna remarks, she misses the taiga, pine trees, and the crunch of snow under her feet while being amazed at strawberries in May and the blazing southern sun that causes everyone in  her family to burn in less than 30 minutes.¹¹Kozhevnikova, A. (2024, May 16). Переезд в Мариуполь из Красноярского края! (“Moving to Mariupol from Krasnoyarsk krai!”) [Video]. YouTube. ¹²It is worth noting that, apart from white Russian workers, non-white workers from Central Asian countries also come to Mariupol. Because of the colonial dependence of Central Asian workers on Russia, it is important that we do not equate their role in the settler colonial process with that of white Russians but also not deny their participation in and responsibility for the entrenchment of the occupation.

The city’s geographical location became a frame for the Russian Federation’s imperial policy of “patronage”. “Sailors’ friendship is the strongest … and maybe it is true that the first couple of sister cities¹³Although the practice of “sisterhood” between cities existed before the emergence of “patronage”, Russian propaganda often uses these two terms interchangeably. were formed between maritime cities,” reads one of the propaganda texts about the “patronage” of Saint Petersburg as a Russian metropolis towards the newly annexed city of Mariupol.¹⁴Петербургский дневник (“St. Petersburg Daily News”). (2022, June 30). Побратимство Петербурга и Мариуполя – новый опыт для всего мира (“The sisterhood of St. Petersburg and Mariupol is a new experience for the whole world”). The policy implemented in all the occupied territories was announced in Mariupol on 1 June 2022 by the head of the “DNR”, Denis Pushilin. In the urban landscape, “patronage” creates various connections between Mariupol and Saint Petersburg’s spaces and institutions, involving overseeing and implementing various infrastructure facilities and housing by the metropolis.¹⁵For more detailed reflections on the phenomenon of this policy, read Daria Hetmanova’s text here. “It’s no secret that the city has suffered significant damage, and now there is an urgent need to build homes for its people. The people of Mariupol see that the best specialists from Saint Petersburg come to them not with weapons but with bricks. Not with tanks but with cranes and other construction equipment,” we read in the same propaganda text.

With no access to the occupied city, we can only derive an image of contemporary Mariupol from the housing sales sector. In addition to satellite images, we get brief and fragmentary glimpses of the urban space from the developers’ renderings and images posted on propaganda Telegram channels where the city residents share the housing problems they experience under occupation and construction workers proudly talk about their contribution to reconstruction. Another fragmented image of the inaccessible city comes from certain media sources that explain about life and the current situation in the city through video blogs with DIY aesthetics, which aim to normalise the purchase of residential property. Interviews with the settler Anna and the leading figure of the occupied city’s real estate business, Luiza Nalyvai, are part of this media infrastructure.

These blogs present different perspectives: some provide a rather polished picture from the point of view of a Mariupol resident who invites people from “Big Russia” to move to their hometown; others, on the contrary, offer the perspective of a Russian who, like a stalker, goes on a mission to the newly annexed lands to show how safe and, above all, important it is to move here. This mixture of Russian propaganda and commercials wrapped in vlog aesthetics builds connections with lands colonized earlier by Russia, for example the settlement of Siberia, or the city of Grozny, seized 30 years ago, which is visited by a blogger from Mariupol, Anastasia Kozhevnikova, who wants to “learn from the [local] experience” of reconstruction.¹⁶Kozhevnikova, A. (2024, October 15). Мариуполь ждёт судьба Грозного? Мариупольцы по России! (“Will Mariupol face the fate of Grozny? Mariupol residents across Russia!”) [Video]. YouTube.

In this range of images through which we try to access the city, the construction of new housing is intertwined with the ways Russian settlers perceive both urban space and also the occupied land itself. In another video of ‘Walk&Talk’, a Russian blogger from Krasnodar enthusiastically describes how much unused land, “ready for development”, there is by the sea, which he sees on his way to the city, adding that there are more “prospects” for Russian investment in the recently destroyed city than there might seem at first glance.¹⁷Walk&Talk. (2024, November 16). Квартиры в новостройках Мариуполя. Кто в основном покупает их сегодня? (“Apartments in new buildings of Mariupol. Who mainly buys them today?”) [Video]. YouTube. Land, housing, and ownership rights in Mariupol have become the main tools of occupation, confirming that “private property — a cornerstone of modern capitalist economies — has actually very little to do with economics and much more to do with politics and power” (Josh Ryan-Collins, Laurie Macfarlane, and Toby Lloyd, 2017). “Why haven’t they demolished [Mariupol], that is, why haven’t they bought everything up and built a million houses here? For one reason — not all Russians believe in these prospects [for investment],” Luiza Nalyvai answers the blogger ‘Walk&Talk’ in the previously mentioned video. “For one reason — not all Russians believe in these prospects [for investment].”

“In every new brick and wall that reaches for the sky.”¹⁸Quote from one of the posts on the propaganda Telegram channel “Russian Mariupol” (published on 27 July 2024). Full text of the post: “The revival of Mariupol is in every new brick and in every wall that reaches for the sky. The construction of a section of the “house with one wall”, building no. 42 on Lenin Avenue, continues.” ‘Leningrad Quarter’ residential complex 

“The first commercial residential complex in the history of Mariupol,” as the ‘Leningrad Quarter’ is called in the Russian propaganda channels, has already appeared in numerous video blogs promoting Russian resettlement to the “new territories”. The name of the housing complex refers to Leningrad (Russian: Ленинград – “City of Lenin”), the name given  to Russia’s second-largest city and Mariupol’s ‘patron’, Saint Petersburg, in 1924. The city retained this name until 1991, when it was once more renamed Saint Petersburg. In addition to settler colonisation, this newly inserted structure involves a complex accumulation of processes that clearly demonstrate how imperial violence works in a city under Russian occupation. This residential complex for mortgage buyers is located in the centre of Mariupol, between Metalurhiv venue, Kuindzhi Street, Kafaiska Street, and Shevchenko Boulevard, built into the space previously occupied by Soviet panel buildings that were severely damaged during the siege of the city.

The complex is being built by SU-2007, a company registered in the Rostov oblast. The company’s owner, Aleksandr Zentsev, also owns the plant Neftemash in Krasnodar, which produces equipment for oil and gas production, processing, and transportation, as well as the company Yugstroy-Energosbyt, which supplies energy to the Krasnodar Krai and Rostov oblast.¹⁹Аstra Press. (2024, June 19). Россия вам ничего не должна (“Russia owes you nothing”). Thus, the Russian energy infrastructure, which has been financing the war machine and serving as a tool for infrastructural blackmail of European cities for years, explicitly manifests itself as a military strategy intertwined with the implementation of urbicide in Mariupol.

Before starting the construction of the Leningrad Quarter, SU-2007 quickly built the Izumrudnyi residential complex — eight compensatory houses near the exit from Mariupol to Manhush highway. Opposite the gateway to the city, near this residential complex, Russian urban planners placed not only the aforementioned Nevskyi residential complex but also a monument to the Specialists of the Ministry of Construction and the Defence Ministry’s Military Construction Complex of the Russian Federation.²⁰The Military Construction Complex of the Russian Ministry of Defence is a separate militarised entity that builds military facilities and social infrastructure in various regions of Russia and in the occupied territories. For earlier reflections on their activity in the occupied Ukrainian territories, see Vlada Vazheyevsky’s text here, as well as their joint presentation with Kateryna Volochniuk. These elements demonstrate how strongly warfare and occupation are linked both to construction and to private companies and capital within the Russian doctrine. The construction excavator, placed on a pedestal in front of a residential complex built for people who lost their homes as a result of the siege, is reminiscent of a similar Soviet tradition of tank monuments aimed to reinforce the Great Patriotic War narrative. At the same time, its performativity makes one think of how, at the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014, Russian proxy forces in Kostiantynivka pulled one of these monuments down from its pedestal and used it to attack a Ukrainian checkpoint.²¹Hito Steyerl describes this in her essay “A Tank on a Pedestal” in Duty Free Art (207), reflecting on connections between history, museums, and the future.

While building the compensatory housing on the outskirts, SU-2007 also launched the construction of the Leningrad Quarter, the mortgage housing in the city centre. They started it in early January 2023 with the demolition of houses no. 77, 79, 81, 87, 89, 91 on Metalurhiv Avenue and no. 70 on Shevchenko Boulevard, a fact that was documented by locals. These buildings had previously been included in the “Unified Register of Buildings and Structures Designated for Demolition”.

Visualisations of the Leningrad Quarter from the developer’s official website

Visualisations of the Leningrad Quarter from the developer’s official website

In the developer’s view, the quarter would consist of eight buildings of 12 to 15 floors. Some of these buildings already contain apartments that people can purchase, but currently the visualisations do not show any addresses, and thus the buyer can only rely on numberings like 13, 14, 15, 17, or 25 blocks (in Russian construction language they are called “liters”)²²The word liter (Russian: литер) is used to name a building within a larger development under construction before it is assigned an official address. In Russia, the liter number often coincides with the building number in the address assigned to it.. Nevertheless, some buildings in the database of DOM.RF already have officially assigned addresses: 25 block is 77a Metalurhiv Avenue, 14 block is 81A Metalurhiv Avenue, and 17 block is 87A Metalurhiv Avenue. Situated in the city centre, the Leningrad Quarter will be surrounded by green areas and playgrounds. The apartments are sold with full interior finishes, similar to those offered in the compensatory housing at Izumrudnyi. However, unlike the settlers purchasing homes in the Leningrad Quarter, many locals who were relocated to Izumrudnyi report sleeping on the floor as they lost all their belongings and received no proper compensation that would have allowed them to afford even basic furniture.²³Walk&Talk. (2023, October 8). Мариуполь. ЖК Изумрудный. Мы раньше рот свой не открывали! (“Mariupol. Izumrudnyi residential complex. We haven’t said a word before!”) [Video]. YouTube.

The block numbering in the Leningrad Quarter is chaotic and does not correspond to the order of construction of new buildings or to the numbering of the houses that were located on those sites before the occupation. Newly constructed buildings on the sites of demolished Soviet apartment blocks receive slightly different addresses with the letter “a” added: for example, 77A Metalurhiv Avenue or 81A Metalurhiv Avenue.

Photo with Dina Sattarova, director of Unified Research and Design Institute for Spatial Planning of the Russian Federation. She also supervised the designing of the Russian master plan for Mariupol.

Photo at the construction site of the Leningrad Quarter

In February 2025, the database of DOM.RF showed that the same developer, SU-2007, had started working on blocks 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 22, 23, and 24. The addresses where some of the houses will be built are also known: 117 (block 9), 121 (block 10), 109 and 111 Metalurhiv Avenue, as well as 85 Shevchenko Boulevard. These buildings are located in the neighbouring quarter, meaning that the Leningrad Quarter, even in this reshaped city body, goes beyond the quarterly structure. Though nothing is known about the construction of some of the blocks, we can also assume that the company is working on at least 25 new buildings in the area surrounding Metalurhiv Avenue; however, we only know about 15 of them right now.

Layers of destruction

The construction of the Leningrad Quarter was launched in the area where the residential buildings adjacent to Metalurhiv Avenue were significantly damaged. These neighbourhoods were targeted by Russian tanks and aviation, as evidenced by numerous video and photographic testimonies. For example, on 10 March, residents at 71 Metalurhiv Avenue filmed the aftermath of an airstrike on the area adjacent to the house where people were cooking over open fires. Shortly afterwards, on 19 March 2022, locals documented a severe fire in houses no. 79 and 81, and the beginning of the fire in the house no. 77. Later footage from early April 2022 shows the three buildings having experienced significant damage after the fire. Between buildings no. 88 and 90 on Kuindzhi Street, residents recorded tank strikes on residential buildings and a tank moving through squares near the house at 100 Metalurhiv Avenue.²⁴One of the three tanks clearly shows Russian “Z” marking; other videos from the neighbourhood and surrounding areas also show only Russian military movement on those dates.

Photos of the burned-out buildings at 77, 79, and 81 Metallurhiv Avenue. Documented by local residents in the spring of 2022. Image from Mariupol Death and Destruction on a Map.

Photos of the burned-out buildings at 77, 79, and 81 Metallurhiv Avenue. Documented by local residents in the spring of 2022. Image from Mariupol Death and Destruction on a Map.

At least five people were killed in houses no. 77 and 81. On the Telegram channel “Killed, Gone, Memory, Mariupol”, one of the posters also reported that she “saw people falling out of the windows” during the fire. Another poster on this channel says her mother was killed on 26 March 2022 while hiding in a house basement at 121 Metalurhiv Ave. People managed to bury some of the dead in front of the houses — locals report a number of graves on the site of a playground and adjacent areas between the houses, where the construction of the Leningrad Quarter is ongoing. Simultaneously, it remains unclear whether the exhumation of the bodies took place before construction began in this area.

We know how this space was destroyed not only from the evidence collected by residents. In March 2022, during the hostilities, the adjacent area was also a scene for filming a series of propaganda materials. The movement of Russian troops and tanks along Metalurhiv Avenue, as well as the attack on the house at 117 Metalurhiv Avenue and multiple fires in the surrounding buildings, were part of the filming of the propaganda “documentary” series At the Edge of the Abyss. The Battle for Mariupol Through the Eyes of a Witness by Maksim Fadeev. The adjacent quarter was not just a backdrop for the propaganda video — it was destroyed to create material for the film. One of the Russian infantrymen who appears in the film, with an assault rifle in his hand, inspects a completely destroyed school building in Mariupol, commenting: “When is this going to be rebuilt? We need to blow it up, demolish it, and build a new one. … [But] all the builders are fighting with assault rifles out there.”

Even though the new construction erases the memory of the destroyed lives and deaths, we propose to look at the emergence of the Leningrad Quarter, above all, as another layer of violence against this space and its inhabitants, continuously with the events of the blockade. This perspective is crucial since it allows us to undermine the propaganda image of Mariupol and to understand what happened there through the fragments of testimonies of people who documented the blockade and bombings while themselves being in the most vulnerable positions, at the moment of losing their homes and without the possibility of evacuation. Meanwhile, these people and their neighbourly ties ended up at the centre of the process shaped by the “housing policy” in occupied Mariupol.

Social Disintegration

Homeowners affected in the same way as those who once lived on the site of the Leningrad Quarter can receive compensatory housing or financial compensation from Russia of 35,000 rubles per m². The procedure for receiving this compensation involves confirming ownership of a property, something which can only be done if the person in question obtains Russian citizenship. The total amount of compensation is determined not by the size of the housing unit a person owned before the invasion but by the standards approved by the occupation authorities: 33 m² for one person, 42 m² for a family of two, or 18 m² for each family member. Because the compensation amount is usually insufficient to buy a new apartment in the city (in the Leningrad Quarter, for example, it is 112,000 rubles per m²), the Mariupol occupation authorities have offered people other options for obtaining housing.

In addition to the newly constructed compensatory housing, primarily in districts that are further from the city centre, compensation is also provided in the form of redistributed apartments that have been declared “ownerless” (Russian: “бесхозяйственные”). This ‘ownerless’ status is determined by a special commission that visits houses in the city to check the presence of the apartment’s owners. If owners are long-term absent or are not home at the time of the visit, the housing unit is added to a special database, after which it can be transferred into communal ownership. The commission often learns about owners’ absence from neighbours. However, locals have also repeatedly described situations where an apartment has become “ownerless” simply because the owner was not home at the time of  the inspection. The owner then has only 30 days to provide, in person, the city administration with the documents confirming the right to the apartment on the list. However, if the owners are not in the territories controlled by Russia, they can only enter the city after passing through “filtration”²⁵Russian filtration is a system of physical facilities used to register, interrogate, torture and detain civilians and prisoners of war on the Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia., a process which takes place only at Sheremetyevo International Airport in the Moscow suburbs.

This housing situation has led to numerous conflicts: the occupation, the dependence of property rights on Russian citizenship, the required filtrations, and the tremendously precarious position of residents who, while waiting for repairs or compensation, were forced to live without access to heating, electricity, and water, along with the emergence of denunciation practices — has all weaponised the housing infrastructure.

Such weaponization has undermined both the social ties that existed before the city’s siege and those formed during the siege. During the blockade, neighbours helped each other, shared food supplies, cooked together in front of houses, buried their murdered neighbours, put out fires in neighbours’ apartments, and looked after them when necessary to prevent them from being looted. These ties are now being severed by denunciations, the displacement of people to different parts of the city and the replacement of these residents by newly-arrived settlers. But in this context, such ties also create specific “protest” movement forms that inevitably follow the notion of what it means to be a “good citizen” in the Russian Federation.

The changes to house numbering patterns, the new buildings on the site of damaged and demolished houses, the complex system of numbering new apartment buildings as blocks, the addresses assigned to buildings only after most of the apartments have been sold — these are all bureaucratic means to protect developers from possible complaints filed by residents against their actions. As a last resort, some locals form “protest” groups that film video appeals to Vladimir Putin, asking him to intervene in the housing situation. They articulate their demands in a very cautious way, and the nature of the violence used against Mariupol during the siege is described either as something necessary or inevitably depersonalised, and most importantly, always separated from the act of “reconstruction”.In November 2024, residents of the destroyed houses at 85, 87, 89, and 91 Metalurhiv Avenue created several such video messages. It seems that with the architectural manipulations in the newly reconstructed space of Mariupol, its residents found themselves in a situation where they remained the owners of non-existent apartments in non-existent buildings. This property and its ownership rights ended up in a space suspended somewhere in the air amidst the new concrete blocks of the Leningrad Quarter highrises. Despite this vague status, a resident of one of the buildings states in the video: “The residents of these houses are the owners of the land plots under these houses.”

According to Ukrainian legislation, residents of the buildings administered by homeowners’ associations can register the right to dispose of the land beneath the buildings where they owned apartments. However, the appeal to land in the context of settler colonialism indicates some underlying processes. In the occupied city, where its infrastructures, including housing, have become a Russian tool for blackmailing the local population, the right to own land remains the last argument in the struggle to live on this territory. This right, however, is forcibly included in a system of laws and institutions pre-arranged by the Russian regime, excluding the right of Mariupol residents to influence urban processes or at least have a dignified life in their own city.

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“The irreparable is not an end. Ruins are not ruination, although this is not to celebrate the aesthetics of ruin,” writes Françoise Vergès in the foreword to the collection War-Torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East. This collection combines reflections on the territories of the Middle East poisoned by war, and the forms of life that emerge and disappear in their ruins in pain and colonial violence. These words draw attention back to life in “zones of non-being” and, against all odds, give hope in the struggle (Vergès, 2023). Nevertheless, looking at the projects of colonial reconstruction in devastated cities, already an embodiment of the irreparable maximum of violence, one realises that this idea was also absorbed by imperial violence. “The irreparable is not an end,” the sterile renderings of the Leningrad Quarter residential complex tell us.

On 11 February 2024, Donald Trump, preparing the ground for the so-called peace talks with Russia, wrote: “This War MUST and WILL END SOON — Too much Death and Destruction.” However, destruction and violence do not exist only amidst ruins. Nowadays, two reconstruction projects have blended into one flux of far-right dreams about colonised territories and their future — perhaps it is the first time Ukraine and Palestine and the genocides against them occur in adjacent sentences. Dreams of valuable land resources and beautiful agricultural territories are intertwined with fantasies about a “Riviera of the Middle East”: both visions might unfold in genocidally devastated territories that are much more than just ruins for their inhabitants. We can already see a preview of these two projects in Mariupol under occupation, “a city by the sea”, whose space from now on includes the Leningrad Quarter as one of its integral parts.

When we hear about violence and destruction, we see not just the missiles, drones, destroyed houses and hospitals — we see the cities torn apart by violence embodied in colonial reconstruction. This violence persistently terrorises cities in the same way, coming not with weapons and tanks but with bricks, concrete blocks, and plastic windows. However, by trying to convince us that architecture can solve the problems that war brings, it aims to dissolve the ties between local communities so that an alternative becomes unthinkable. Having seen these processes take shape in the space of Mariupol now, we may still be able to stop them.

Cover image: Donetsk News Agency

This study used data from open sources describing the state of development in Mariupol as of March 2025.

References

Ryan-Collins, J., Macfarlane, L., & Lloyd, T. (2017). Rethinking the economics of land and housing. Zed Books.

Vergès, F. (2023). Foreword. In U. Yildirim (Ed.), War-torn ecologies, an-archic fragments: Reflections from the Middle East. ICI Berlin Press. pp. VII–XIX.