Between mid-2024 and early 2026, four occupation courts in Mariupol ruled on 2,694 petitions converting “ownerless” homes into municipal title. Thirty-three judges signed those rulings. Not one of the docket records — the public-facing case card for each ruling — names a street, a building, or a cadastral number (only 4 cases recover a cadastral number from the embedded ruling text). The case against the house never had to say where the house was.
Mariupol’s four courts were the first this project read in full. They are not exceptional. Extending the same crawl to every occupation court in the Donetsk region returned ownerless-property dockets from 26 courts — and the Mariupol pattern holds across all of them. (Fifteen further courts returned nothing under their own domain — but a ВС ДНР venue notice (captured 2026-06-28) shows 10 of those simply had their jurisdiction formally transferred to a court already in this dataset, so their cases aren’t actually zero: 8 Avdiivka cases have already been recovered, hiding inside Yasynuvata’s docket. The other 5 are genuine ghost/destroyed courts — cities Russia holds but has flattened, with nothing left to seize, or courts standing in for Donetsk-oblast territory Russia claims on paper but has never controlled.)
The no-address finding below is therefore not a Mariupol quirk: it is standard depersonalization practice under Russian Federal Law No. 262-FZ, applied here exactly as at any Russian court nationwide (see §04 below) — what is specific to this dataset is the practical effect, not the rule. And Mariupol’s own court conveyor has now stopped — filings and rulings fall to zero through early 2026 while the rest of the region keeps running — the data signature of the December 2025 federal law (ФКЗ-4) abolishing the court stage, with Mariupol, the Roskadastr pilot, finishing first. Full breakdown: docs/dnr_district_first_instance_2026-06.md.
Every one of these 2,694 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 the overwhelming majority of cases in this dataset is the occupation city administration (Administration of the Mariupol Urban Okrug, DNR, INN 9310011256, or its predecessor, the Administration of the City of Mariupol, DNR, used prior to the formal reclassification as an urban okrug). 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.
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.
| Judge | Court | Cases | Granted | Disputed / withdrawn | First filing | Last ruling |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dmitry RomanovРоманов Дмитрий Сергеевич | Zhovtnevyi | 288 | 258 | 26 | 12.07.2024 | 15.01.2026 |
| Tatiana MyakonkayaМяконькая Татьяна Александровна | Zhovtnevyi | 201 | 170 | 24 | 08.08.2024 | 17.02.2026 |
| Viktoria GrevtsovaГревцова Виктория Алексеевна | Primorsky | 188 | 152 | 35 | 12.07.2024 | 09.02.2026 |
| Natalia KralininaКралинина Наталья Геннадьевна | Zhovtnevyi | 173 | 161 | 11 | 21.06.2024 | 25.12.2025 |
| Pavel BelousovБелоусов Павел Валериевич | Zhovtnevyi | 162 | 102 | 57 | 07.06.2024 | 20.03.2026 |
| Botagoz TleuzhanovaТлеужанова Ботагоз Елеусизовна | Primorsky | 146 | 119 | 25 | 17.07.2024 | 09.02.2026 |
| Nikita StrunovСтрунов Никита Иванович | Zhovtnevyi | 143 | 123 | 17 | 08.08.2024 | 22.05.2026 |
| Vladimir ReznichenkoРезниченко Владимир Алексеевич | Primorsky | 138 | 89 | 46 | 11.06.2024 | 27.04.2026 |
| Natalia NidzievaНидзиева Наталья Николаевна | Primorsky | 128 | 98 | 29 | 12.07.2024 | 26.12.2025 |
| Alexander LeonovЛеонов Александр Юрьевич | Zhovtnevyi | 127 | 108 | 18 | 03.06.2024 | 17.12.2025 |
| Yulia SazonovaСазонова Юлия Юрьевна | Zhovtnevyi | 118 | 83 | 34 | 14.05.2024 | 15.01.2026 |
| Denis PavlenkoПавленко Денис Константинович | Ordzhonikidzevsky | 93 | 86 | 7 | 07.08.2024 | 02.03.2026 |
| Elvira AkhtyamovaАхтямова Эльвира Саматовна | Ordzhonikidzevsky | 90 | 74 | 16 | 22.07.2024 | 08.12.2025 |
| Viktoria BoykoБойко Виктория Олеговна | Primorsky | 85 | 66 | 19 | 10.10.2024 | 11.02.2026 |
| Renata SakhapovaСахапова Рената Рамилевна | Ordzhonikidzevsky | 83 | 72 | 11 | 23.07.2024 | 09.12.2025 |
| Oleg LogvinovЛогвинов Олег Валентинович | Ilyichevsky | 80 | 75 | 5 | 04.12.2024 | 11.12.2025 |
| Dametken KenzhegarinaКенжегарина Даметкен Максутовна | Zhovtnevyi | 74 | 58 | 16 | 24.06.2025 | 27.04.2026 |
| Natalia DulkinaДулькина Наталия Викторовна | Zhovtnevyi | 66 | 54 | 12 | 04.07.2025 | 05.02.2026 |
| Alexander MartynovМартынов Александр Анатольевич | Ilyichevsky | 66 | 57 | 9 | 04.12.2024 | 19.12.2025 |
| Ekaterina StepanovaСтепанова Екатерина Васильевна | Ilyichevsky | 59 | 52 | 7 | 25.10.2024 | 19.12.2025 |
| Eldar MiterevМитерев Эльдар Евгеньевич | Ordzhonikidzevsky | 57 | 57 | 0 | 21.08.2024 | 20.11.2025 |
| Yulia GolovchenkoГоловченко Юлия Николаевна | Ilyichevsky | 46 | 41 | 5 | 17.12.2024 | 19.12.2025 |
| Svetlana KlimovaКлимова Светлана Юрьевна | Ordzhonikidzevsky | 17 | 13 | 4 | 24.07.2024 | 29.04.2025 |
| Aizhan TaubayevaТаубаева Айжан Умырзаговна | Zhovtnevyi | 10 | 9 | 1 | 12.07.2024 | 06.09.2024 |
| Maria RempeРемпе Мария Васильевна | Ordzhonikidzevsky | 9 | 8 | 1 | 21.08.2024 | 29.01.2025 |
| Elena MarkovaМаркова Елена Владимировна | Ilyichevsky | 4 | 2 | 2 | 07.11.2025 | 18.03.2026 |
| Evgenia GavrilyukГаврилюк Евгения Анатольевна | Ordzhonikidzevsky | 4 | 4 | 0 | 21.11.2024 | 21.02.2025 |
| Elvira GuzairovaГузаирова Эльвира Ильдаровна | Zhovtnevyi | 2 | 1 | 1 | 15.12.2025 | 15.04.2026 |
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. (An earlier pass over the original 2,666-case sample found 9 cases with no judge name in the docket card; the current judge-name extraction over the fuller 2,694-case population finds none missing — see `scripts/182`.)
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.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:
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 §07.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:
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 §07.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 2,694 cases. What it contains is a case number, a judge, two institutional parties, a category of claim, and a result.
A court can be shown, publicly and verifiably, to have stripped title from 2,694 homes — and the public record of how it did so does not, on its own, let anyone determine which 2,694 homes. Matching a specific ruling to a specific address requires either the full text of the underlying decision or independent triangulation through the registry and decree data this project tracks elsewhere. The region-wide crawl has since retrieved that underlying ruling text at scale — it is embedded in the case card on about 1,550 of the 8,271 region-wide cases — and it confirms the wall rather than breaching it: the street address is redacted to «<адрес>» on 100% of published rulings. The only property identifier that survives the redaction is an occasional cadastral number (it leaks on roughly 2% of texts); those have linked a handful of cases — four so far, all Mariupol — to named properties on this project’s spine by exact cadastral match. The street-level address gap, for the overwhelming majority, stays open — not because the occupier designed this specific gap, but because it never had to: standard nationwide court-records depersonalization (see below) already does the work.
That gap is not unique to occupation courts — case cards published under Russian Federal Law No. 262-FZ are depersonalized by standard nationwide practice, the same rule any Russian court applies before posting a ruling online. What is specific to this dataset is the practical effect: a displaced family with no other route to the underlying decision text has no way to confirm from the public record alone which home a given ruling stripped title from. The redaction is routine; the consequence, for these 2,694 cases, is not.
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.
On appeal: the doctrine, in writing
Appeals to the DNR Supreme Court
A losing party at first instance can appeal to the DNR Supreme Court. Reading the full reasoning text of those appeals — not just their outcomes — surfaces something the docket-level statistics above cannot: a written doctrine. The court establishes a Mariupol owner’s Ukrainian citizenship first, before any fact about the property, then reads her flight from the siege of her own city back to her as voluntary abandonment of her home. From there the result is a formality. The same court, ruling on owners who can document Russian citizenship or who personally assert their claim through occupation channels, reaches the opposite outcome on the same facts.
“Факт оплаты таких услуг иным лицом вместо собственника сам по себе не свидетельствует о выполнении собственником обязанностей, связанных с бременем содержания своего имущества.”
— Ruling 33-2769/2025. The court’s own file shows gas, water and communal accounts paid and current, by the owner’s representative. It seizes the flat anyway — paying your bills, it holds, doesn’t count if you didn’t pay them in person.
“Само по себе выявление лиц, претендующих на признание за ними права на имущество, не свидетельствует о наличии спора.”
— Same ruling. An owner coming forward to claim her own home is held, in writing, not to create a legal dispute. Elsewhere in the same docket, a claimant appearing is exactly what triggers a dispute and saves the property — for Mariupol’s displaced, the claimant is read out of existence.
“…намерение… воспрепятствовать передачи такого имущества в собственность государства в обход действующего в переходный период законодательства.”
— Rulings 33-2769/2025 and 33-1509/2025, identical wording. An heir defending his own flat is reframed, by name, as obstructing the transfer of his home to the state. The objective is stated, not inferred.
Source: full reasoning text of the DNR Supreme Court’s published ownerless-property appeals (case nos. 33-2342/2025, 33-2769/2025, 33-2875/2025, 33-1873/2025, 33-1509/2025; control case 33-526/2026), captured and hashed from vs--dnr.sudrf.ru. This is a textual finding, established by direct reading of specific rulings — not a population-level statistic, and not dependent on one.
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.
Outcome taxonomy (recomputed 2026-06-28 from the fuller 2,694-case population, `scripts/182`'s own disambiguated categories — not a 1:1 remap of the original taxonomy above, whose discontinued/returned/rejected/unlabeled sub-splits are not reproducible from any script in this repo): seizure granted 2,248 (83.4%) · left without consideration 338 (12.5%) · withdrawn/terminated 92 (3.4%) · transferred venue 5 · joined to another case 1 · unclassified 10. Percentages are of all 2,694 cases.
The project’s author investigates and documents the dispossession of Mariupol’s residents using only his own time and resources — no editorial budget, no grants, no institutional backing. If you find this work valuable, you can help offset some of the costs I’ve incurred.