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Case Study IV · the now-closed court route · occupied Mariupol
Special proceeding, Russian Civil Procedure Code ch. 33

The court that took title without ever naming the house.

Between mid-2024 and early 2026, four occupation courts in Mariupol ruled on 2,666 petitions converting “ownerless” homes into municipal title. Twenty-eight judges signed those rulings. Not one of the 2,666 docket records — the public-facing case card for each ruling — names a street, a building, or a cadastral number. The case against the house never had to say where the house was.

2,666rulings · 4 district courts
mid-2024 – early 2026
28named judges
signed at least one ruling
82.2%granted on first hearing
2,192 of 2,666
42 daysmedian filing→ruling
granted cases
2,666 / 2,666docket cards naming
no street address
00 · The instrument

A lawsuit with a city as plaintiff and no one as defendant

Every one of these 2,666 cases is filed under the same procedural article: Russian Civil Procedure Code, ch. 33 — “special proceeding”, seeking recognition of municipal ownership over an “ownerless” immovable thing. The petitioner, in every single case in this dataset, is the occupation city administration (Administration of the Mariupol Urban Okrug, DNR, INN 9310011256, or its predecessor entity). The only other named participant is typically the regional cadastre and registration office — never a resident, never an owner, never anyone with a name a displaced family would recognize.

That absence is not an oversight; it is the procedure’s entire design. “Special proceeding” is the civil-procedure track for facts with no opposing party — declaring someone dead in absentia, establishing a legal fact. Applying it to an inhabited city after a forced mass displacement converts the absence of the owner — an absence the occupation itself caused, by siege, by forced passportization requirements, by a closed and hostile border — into the legal absence of any party to object.

RD4U · A3.6 Rome Statute · 8(2)(a)(iv)
01 · Named, with their record

Twenty-eight judges. Every ruling counted.

These are not anonymous administrative acts. Russian civil procedure requires a named presiding judge on every case card, and the occupation courts’ public docket portal (sudrf.ru) publishes that name, the filing and decision dates, and the result — for anyone who looks. The table below is every judge who has signed at least one ruling in this dataset, ranked by volume, with their full ruling record broken out by outcome.

JudgeCourtCasesGranted Disputed / withdrawnFirst filingLast ruling
Dmitry RomanovРоманов Дмитрий СергеевичZhovtnevyi2882582612.07.202415.01.2026
Tatiana MyakonkayaМяконькая Татьяна АлександровнаZhovtnevyi2011702408.08.202417.02.2026
Viktoria GrevtsovaГревцова Виктория АлексеевнаPrimorsky1881523512.07.202409.02.2026
Natalia KralininaКралинина Наталья ГеннадьевнаZhovtnevyi1731611121.06.202425.12.2025
Pavel BelousovБелоусов Павел ВалериевичZhovtnevyi1621025707.06.202420.03.2026
Botagoz TleuzhanovaТлеужанова Ботагоз ЕлеусизовнаPrimorsky1461192517.07.202409.02.2026
Nikita StrunovСтрунов Никита ИвановичZhovtnevyi1431231708.08.202422.05.2026
Vladimir ReznichenkoРезниченко Владимир АлексеевичPrimorsky138894611.06.202427.04.2026
Natalia NidzievaНидзиева Наталья НиколаевнаPrimorsky128982912.07.202426.12.2025
Alexander LeonovЛеонов Александр ЮрьевичZhovtnevyi1271081803.06.202417.12.2025
Yulia SazonovaСазонова Юлия ЮрьевнаZhovtnevyi118833414.05.202415.01.2026
Denis PavlenkoПавленко Денис КонстантиновичOrdzhonikidzevsky9386707.08.202402.03.2026
Elvira AkhtyamovaАхтямова Эльвира СаматовнаOrdzhonikidzevsky90741622.07.202408.12.2025
Viktoria BoykoБойко Виктория ОлеговнаPrimorsky85661910.10.202411.02.2026
Renata SakhapovaСахапова Рената РамилевнаOrdzhonikidzevsky83721123.07.202409.12.2025
Oleg LogvinovЛогвинов Олег ВалентиновичIlyichevsky8075504.12.202411.12.2025
Dametken KenzhegarinaКенжегарина Даметкен МаксутовнаZhovtnevyi74581624.06.202527.04.2026
Natalia DulkinaДулькина Наталия ВикторовнаZhovtnevyi66541204.07.202505.02.2026
Alexander MartynovМартынов Александр АнатольевичIlyichevsky6657904.12.202419.12.2025
Ekaterina StepanovaСтепанова Екатерина ВасильевнаIlyichevsky5952725.10.202419.12.2025
Eldar MiterevМитерев Эльдар ЕвгеньевичOrdzhonikidzevsky5757021.08.202420.11.2025
Yulia GolovchenkoГоловченко Юлия НиколаевнаIlyichevsky4641517.12.202419.12.2025
Svetlana KlimovaКлимова Светлана ЮрьевнаOrdzhonikidzevsky1713424.07.202429.04.2025
Aizhan TaubayevaТаубаева Айжан УмырзаговнаZhovtnevyi109112.07.202406.09.2024
Maria RempeРемпе Мария ВасильевнаOrdzhonikidzevsky98121.08.202429.01.2025
Elena MarkovaМаркова Елена ВладимировнаIlyichevsky42207.11.202518.03.2026
Evgenia GavrilyukГаврилюк Евгения АнатольевнаOrdzhonikidzevsky44021.11.202421.02.2025
Elvira GuzairovaГузаирова Эльвира ИльдаровнаZhovtnevyi21115.12.202515.04.2026

Full ФИО (given name + patronymic + surname) shown below each judge’s name above, where captured. “Disputed / withdrawn” aggregates left-without-consideration, discontinued, returned, transferred-jurisdiction and rejected outcomes. 9 of the 2,666 cases carry no judge name in the source docket card and are excluded from this table; they are included in every other count on this page.

Source: each court’s public case-card portal ({court}.sudrf.ru, §“Судья” field), captured per the project’s standard chain of custody. Distinct judges named in the docket field itself — not inferred, not aggregated from a secondary source.
02 · A worked case · the formula

Twenty-seven days, no defendant, decided in one sitting

Case No. 2-4974/2025 (unified ID 93RS0006-01-2025-006636-02), Zhovtnevyi District Court, presiding judge Dmitry Romanov — decoded directly from the captured docket card, exactly as published:

07.11.2025
Petition filed and registered. Petitioner: Administration of the Mariupol Urban Okrug, DNR (INN 9310011256). Interested party: the DNR cadastre & registration office.
10.11.2025
Accepted to proceedings; case assigned for hearing — same day as the procedural order setting it down.
04.12.2025, 09:15
Single hearing held. Ruling rendered: GRANTED.
08.12.2025
Reasoned decision finalized in writing.
15.12.2025
Case closed and filed to the records department.

Twenty-seven days from filing to a granted ruling, one hearing, no recorded appearance by anyone contesting the petition — because no one was named who could. The case card lists a category, a judge, two institutional parties, and a result. It does not list what was taken.

Source: mar-zhovt––dnr.sudrf.ru case-card portal, case_uid c33e847b-2167-4ecd-b0d6-471090c7efd3, captured 08.06.2026 — hash on file, see Provenance §06.
03 · The exception · 4 cases of 2,666

The one failure mode: someone has to show up twice

The system has exactly one recorded friction point, and it only fires if a counter-claim of an actual ownership dispute reaches the file. It happened four times in this entire dataset (0.15%). One, decoded in full:

02.12.2025
Petition filed (case No. 2-239/2026, unified ID 93RS0006-01-2024-004862-70 — itself a re-filing of an earlier matter, prior registration No. 2-3742/2024). Same petitioner, same judge, Dmitry Romanov.
23.12.2025, 10:15
First hearing scheduled — adjourned. Recorded reason: non-appearance of the petitioner itself.
15.01.2026, 10:00
Second hearing held. Ruling: LEFT WITHOUT CONSIDERATION — existence of a dispute over title established.

This is the closest thing to a contested hearing in the dataset, and it still never produces a named resident, an address, or a substantive ruling on anyone’s ownership — only a procedural dismissal, leaving the underlying claim to be re-filed. The other 337 “left without consideration” and 88 “discontinued” outcomes carry no comparable explanation in the docket field; this is the one instance where the underlying reason was visible at all.

Source: mar-zhovt––dnr.sudrf.ru case-card portal, case_uid aed20aff-85c4-4069-90ec-8c1c453164c0, captured 08.06.2026 — hash on file, see Provenance §06.
04 · What 2,666 records have in common

The address gap

This project cross-references every property it documents against an average of two or more independent sources — registries, decrees, satellite damage assessments, resale listings. For the court docket, that linkage runs into a wall built into the source itself: the case-card record — the only public trace of the ruling — does not contain a street name, a building number, or a cadastral reference, in any of the 2,666 cases. What it contains is a case number, a judge, two institutional parties, a category of claim, and a result.

What this means in practice

A court can be shown, publicly and verifiably, to have stripped title from 2,666 homes — and the public record of how it did so does not, on its own, let anyone determine which 2,666 homes. Matching a specific ruling to a specific address requires either the full text of the underlying decision (a separate, harder-to-obtain document this project has not yet retrieved at scale) or independent triangulation through the registry and decree data this project tracks elsewhere. For this dataset specifically, that triangulation has not yet closed the gap: of 2,666 court cases, zero are currently linked to a named property on this project’s evidence spine.

That gap is not a flaw in how this project reads the record. It is the record. A judge’s name, a filing date, and a one-word result are exactly as much as the system was built to make visible — everything else about the home itself stays inside a file that, for a displaced family trying to find out what happened to their address, is invisible by design.

0 / 2,666 address-linked RD4U · A3.6
05 · Volume & closure

A route that opened, peaked, and was retired

Filings by quarter trace the life of this entire legal mechanism: a slow start in mid-2024, a peak in the second and third quarters of 2025, then a sharp collapse after Federal Constitutional Law No. 4 (15 Dec 2025) abolished the court stage outright — replacing it with direct registry inclusion as title, no ruling required.

Filings by quarter (court-of-filing date). The Q4 2025–Q2 2026 collapse is the court route closing, not the underlying practice stopping — the same “ownerless” designations continue directly through the registry. See the Dispossession Pipeline exhibit, Stage B, for how this route fits the wider system, and the 12,948-entry registry that has absorbed the function since.

06 · Provenance

Sourcing

Every figure on this page is computed directly from this project’s own structured court-case dataset, built by capturing each court’s public case-card portal under standard chain-of-custody practice (SHA-256 hash and UTC timestamp at retrieval, raw HTML preserved before parsing). Aggregate counts are reproducible by anyone with database access to the project; the two worked cases above are reproducible by anyone with a web browser, against the live court portals, using the case numbers and unified IDs given.

Full source catalogue & methodology notes
  • Primary source Public case-card portals of Mariupol’s four occupation district courts (Zhovtnevyi, Primorsky, Ordzhonikidzevsky, Ilyichevsky), domain pattern {court}--dnr.sudrf.ru. 2,666 case cards captured, parsed for court, judge, case number, filing/decision dates, and outcome.
  • Worked cases Decoded directly from the raw captured HTML (cp1251-encoded) rather than from the parsed database fields, to verify the underlying record matches the structured data and to recover detail — hearing-level events, party names, the dispute-case’s adjournment reason — not retained in the project’s standard schema. Case 2-4974/2025 (case_uid c33e847b-2167-4ecd-b0d6-471090c7efd3): SHA-256 4d56565294e8c8606b89bc1af308ed96f44cf2a57d2e13132e6cac866d953d74. Case 2-239/2026 (case_uid aed20aff-85c4-4069-90ec-8c1c453164c0): SHA-256 e779bfabef898563a7ecc245f6884db1af3c46d6a105b9be7d65cb490cccf020.
  • What is not yet captured The full text of the reasoned decisions («мотивированное решение») referenced in each case’s event log is a separate document this project has not retrieved at scale — it may contain the address information absent from the case card itself. Closing that gap is the main open item for this dataset; see the project’s internal gap register.
  • Legal grounds, as recorded Petitions cite combinations of: signs of ownerlessness (“признаки бесхозяйности”, 2,657 of 2,666 cases); the owner’s failure to appear (775 cases); absence of an EGRN cadastral registration (297 cases); and DNR Law No. 66-РЗ (444 cases) as the underlying ownerless-property statute.

Outcome taxonomy: granted 2,192 (82.2%) · left without consideration 338 (12.7%) · discontinued 88 (3.3%) · returned 29 · transferred jurisdiction 5 · rejected 3 · unlabeled 11. Percentages are of all 2,666 cases.