Why this archive exists, in the author's own words

I am Alexey Kovalev, a journalist. On 24 February 2022, my country — Russia — invaded Ukraine. My first reaction, I remember, was a sense of the absurd: missiles fired by my own countrymen were slamming into buildings exactly like the ones around me in Moscow, in the middle of neighbourhoods exactly like mine — because their blueprints came from the same Soviet architectural bureaus.

What kept me from losing my mind to the monstrousness of it was the work of a journalist. I interviewed victims of my country's crimes and defenders of Ukraine, edited my colleagues' dispatches, wrote my own reporting on the invasion. It seemed to me that if I could not prevent this, then my moral duty as a Russian was at least to help record the names of the criminals who carry the same red passport as I do.

About the project

The first victim of my country — and an ominously precise omen of what would befall many other Ukrainian cities over the next nearly four years — was Mariupol. I have never been to Ukraine myself, apart from school holidays in Crimea. And the Ukraine in which the city of Mariupol existed, I will never reach now. That city still appears on the map of the world only out of habit — like Bakhmut, Sieverodonetsk, and the other ghost towns destroyed one after another by my country's army.

From February to May 2022, Mariupol was shelled so savagely that the footage looked like the most apocalyptic battles of the Second World War. By various estimates, tens of thousands of civilians were killed; the exact number we may never know. The scale of one of the largest mass killings of the civilian population of a single city can still only be gauged from the fresh graves at Starokrymske cemetery, visible from space. What happened — and is still happening — to the Mariupol residents who survived is what this project sets out to document.

Method: bureaucratic self-incrimination

Russia's crimes in Mariupol did not end when the indiscriminate carpet shelling of densely populated residential districts stopped. They simply became different war crimes — far less visible, and stretched out over time. Urbicide, the killing of a city, can be carried out without bombers or multiple-rocket batteries.

At the end of 2022, the bureaucrats of the occupation administration briskly inventoried the surviving housing stock, jotting notes in the margins like "building completely burned out, corpse in the courtyard, site clearance required." It was they who compiled and published the list of "objects damaged as a result of combat operations" slated for demolition. And it was they who signed the demolition orders — often for apartment blocks and entire neighbourhoods that were still largely intact. That makes them every bit as culpable as the divisional commander who gave the order to shell residential quarters.

But demolition is only one of the two modes of this urbicide. The second, quieter one is dispossession by paperwork. The homes of Mariupol residents who survived but had fled, or who were killed, are declared "ownerless" (bezkhozyaynaya) by the occupation administration, entered into a registry, passed through the occupation courts that have taken the place of Ukrainian justice, and handed to new owners. By Human Rights Watch's count, roughly 8,100 such cases have already moved through those courts. The same principle holds here: every one of these rulings is a numbered decree, signed by a named individual.

In the course of this investigation I ran into a paradox that the French philosopher Jacques Derrida called "archive fever" — the perpetrator's wholly irrational compulsion to document his own crimes in meticulous detail. Every demolished house is a specific order with a specific number. Every decree stripping people of their own ruins bears a specific person's signature.

After Meduza — where from 2019 to 2022 I headed the investigations desk — I spent two years gathering material for future war-crimes cases as an open-source (OSINT) consultant for the Clooney Foundation for Justice (CFJ). Drawing those threads together, I built my own evidence-collection system. For now it is an experimental prototype, but it already yields tangible results. The system comprises:

• Automated evidence collection. Python scripts systematically harvest official documents from the websites and other public resources of the occupation administration. For every file, link, and document, a SHA-256 hash and a timestamp are recorded — establishing an unbroken chain of custody.
• A spatiotemporal PostgreSQL/PostGIS database holds source-enriched data on each property: its administrative unit, street, building, and its legal and physical status at every stage of its life.
• A normalisation layer. Every address is reconciled across all plausible spellings of each toponym (Cyrillic in Russian and Ukrainian, Latin in English transcription) and across three temporal layers (Ukrainian toponyms before and after the 2015–2016 decommunisation, and the occupation-era renamings). Most addresses are geocoded via the Google Maps API. The system also catches scanning errors, mixed-language strings, and corrupted spellings.
• A cross-referencing pipeline. Satellite imagery, official documents, and damage assessments are drawn together and tied to specific properties and specific perpetrators, forming court-ready evidence packages — for restitution claims to the Council of Europe's Register of Damage and for criminal proceedings under the Rome Statute.

The same normalised data is meant to underpin a public resource where displaced Mariupol residents can look up their own address and learn the fate of their home.