Hi, this is Katya Krasotkina. Today Verstka published my piece about how the authorities...

Hi, this is Katya Krasotkina. Today Verstka published my piece about how the authorities are declaring housing in the occupied territories ownerless.

The idea to write this story came to me when I was reading messages in a local chat devoted to such housing. Some people cannot come to Mariupol, some did come or never left the city, but were unable to sort out their documents. And apartments are simply being taken away, sometimes sealed up with people inside.

The occupation authorities built this system over years, passing new laws. With every month, it became easier to lose an apartment or house. Now even a court is no longer needed. And new residents are already being moved into the seized apartments, for example people who lost their own homes because of the war. Whether they will end up on the street again when the owners return is an open question.

The hardest thing for me was persuading those affected to give interviews. I wrote to dozens of people, but only two agreed to be interviewed. Some suspected I was a fraudster, others were not happy with Verstka, and I received messages criticizing the outlet from interviewees with both pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian positions. One woman wrote to me that she would “try to break through the wall of silence from HER side,” even though state media do not cover the issue of “ownerless property,” which she herself had complained to me about.

One of the stories that had come together had to be almost completely removed from the finished text. Apparently, the woman was frightened even by anonymous publication, stopped responding, and did not send the documents needed for fact-checking.

But I am very glad that in the end we published this story. It contains a detailed description of how this seizure of housing works, stage by stage. It has figures on how many apartments and houses have been declared ownerless: in Mariupol alone, there are thousands of them. And, especially valuable, it includes the story of a woman who thought she had done everything necessary not to lose her home in her native city.

Read the story at the link (with a VPN):

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“I have neither a homeland nor a flag left.” How the authorities are declaring housing in the occupied territories ownerless

Apartments can be sealed up with residents inside, and getting them back from municipal ownership is extremely difficult