Dr. Jade McGlynn (7:47)
Yes, and I should be clear that of course sometimes we get the data with a lag. So this is not necessarily new data that goes up to 2026, some of it does on the commercial property. But one of the reasons why I wanted to speak about it today was recently I gave a keynote speech at the Indiana Taraschevchenko Conference for Ukrainian Studies. And of the fellow academics in the audience were themselves from Ukraine, and of course many were from the occupied territories. And one of them rose a really important point, which was that I hadn't spent much of my speech, which was about the occupied territories, talking about property seizure. And of course, it's such a massive part of what's happening, because I think we can all understand what it would feel like if your house was just stolen, deemed to be ownerless, all of your belongings still in there, coupled with the huge trauma, particularly of the siege. And whilst this is happening across the occupied territories, there's something particularly intense about the ways in which it's happening in Mariupol. So I wanted to speak a little bit about that today. So there's two data sets that come out of Marupol, and I think they tell us quite a lot about how the occupation works, both not just in that military phenomenon sense, but also in the administrative sense. So the bureaucracy of occupation, essentially. So the first data set is a Russian municipal registry from 2025, and it lists around 9,000, so 8,526 residential properties across districts of Marupal. And then the second data set is a series of 20 monthly snapshots of a parallel commercial property registry. So it goes from October 2024 through to June 2025. And then for both cases, we have a few that are more recent, but that are part of the data set. So it's a messy data set, as always, with the occupied territories. So these aren't Ukrainian estimates, they're Russia's own kind of administrative records. And what it shows is basically a systematic, legally structured program of property seizure dressed up in very Soviet lang of municipal administration. So the mechanism they use is something that's called. So it translates as ownerlessness. What it means is if a property has no identifiable owner, the state can take it. And what the Russian occupation authorities have done is transpose that legal mechanism, which existed anyway in Russian law. They've applied it onto occupied Ukrainian territory and of course, to a city where most residents fled a siege. In practice, this means that there's no court, there's no notification. We also have in our possession a number of pictures of the notifications that are pinned onto people's doors. To say, this is ownerless property. They have no requirement to contact you. And so people, you know, try to find out if their house is on the list. For informal means, there's that sort of panic. Oh, yes, your house on the list? Oh, no, actually, it was next door. There was a decree that authorizes this to happen. It's called Decree 336. It was signed in August 2024, although the process beginning well before August 2024, as reflected by the data sets, and it quite explicitly requires no judicial determination. So you don't need to have the courts involved. The municipality self certifies and then your flat becomes part of the Russian municipal property stock. So sometimes people are even living in the flats and the flats are deemed ownerless, often because somebody wants that flat, somebody wants your house so they can take it. There is, interestingly, of the properties that were documented in the first list of the residential properties, over 90% of them are classified as just fully ownerless. And so then they're put into the Russian federal land registry, it's called Vrovskadastra. And then they just belong to the state. Why not all of them? Because essentially there is a reclamation pathway. There is a way for you to fight back to get your property, but it means going back to the occupation Housing Authority and you have to have done it before November 2024. And it's interesting, there is that formal pathway, but essentially the barriers are so, so high, including having to return into occupied territories, that it's insurmountable. And for many people who did go back into the occupied territories, there are quite a few scandals about it in the Ukrainian media in 2024. So they went into occupied territories, registered their property and then left again. The Russians then produced additional barriers that meant that people who they would need to then come back in, etc. So that you have the residential property. There's also a commercial seizure program which is in some ways it provides some explanations of other things that go on in terms of business in Marupol. So most of the average size of the seized commercial Property is about 70 square meters. So we're talking quite small areas. There are huge things like port city, which is massive sort of shopping center that was looted. I guess it's how petty and how thorough the occupational authorities are. I mean, they're taking hairdressers, pharmacies, cafes, small kind of Tesco expresses sort of equivalents to cinemas, Protestant churches, just the sheer number of Protestant churches that have been destroyed, essentially we're talking about all of them in the occupied territories. A children's charity center, a cultural center, bank. I mean, it's just a huge permanent displacement mechanism really, but also a way of, let's be honest, a kind of corruption extraction, redesignating wealth, using it to buy loyalty. And it's just legalized looting in future for accountability processes. Some of these data sets are going to be really useful in terms of looking through, if we think about, you know, after previous wars where property has been confiscated from people unfairly and trying to restore that. I think that's one of the important elements of working through these data sets is at least to have a hope in. In a future where there's some justice, even if that future right now feels quite far away.
