They fought the seizure in the occupier’s own courts. They lost three times.

A nine-story building in the center of the city

The building stood at Metallurgov Avenue, 47Pre-war (UA)проспект Металургів, 47Occupation (RU)проспект Металлургов, 47, in central Mariupol — about 800 metres from the Drama Theatre, beside the central market, on one of the city’s longest avenues where it crosses Soborna StreetPre-war (UA)вулиця СоборнаOccupation (RU)улица СоборнаяRenamedOccupation authorities renamed it Varganova Street, after Soviet architect Yevgeny Varganov. Nine floors, two entrances, ordinary Soviet-era housing. After the siege it became one of the war’s most recognizable images, in photographs by Russian military correspondentsNo other journalists were in the city during the siege, apart from Ukrainians Mstyslav Chernov and Yevhen Maloletka, whose footage became the basis of the documentary 20 Days in Mariupol.: a single entrance section punched out through the middle, the rest still standing. People kept living in it, and in its basement, after the fighting passed.

Intact, then hit, then gone

The same footprint, from orbit, across four years. In June 2021 the long apartment block sits whole behind its row of street trees. By March 2022 one entrance section has imploded — the dark collapsed gap is visible from space, consistent with a 17 March 2022 explosion the residents and local press both describe. By August 2024 the building is gone and the lot is cleared to bare ground; the street trees survive the building they once shaded.

Jun 2021 · intact

Mar 2022 · entrance imploded

Aug 2024 · cleared lot

The same March 2022 moment, from the street. Two stills from independent footage show the identical entrance section the satellite frame above captures from orbit — the gap punched straight through the building, fire-scorched concrete and exposed rebar on either side, residents’ balconies and air-conditioning units intact one floor away from the collapse.

Mar 2022 · street level

Mar 2022 · closer angle

The same case, lost at three levels

The building’s homeowners’ association — HOA “Troianda-M”ТСЖ «Троянда-М» — товарищество собственников жилья, the post-2022 re-registration of the same pre-war Ukrainian condominium association — had to register as a Russian legal entity in July 2024 merely to be recognized as a party. It then carried the residents’ claim up the full ladder of Russian civil courts, and lost at every rung.

Unified case ID 93RS0006-01-2024-005922-91 threads through all three levels. Press reporting (Agents.Media, 27.02.2026) described the residents as filing “with the Supreme Court” — but the cassation court’s own docket (case 8Г-12687/2026, captured directly, linked above) shows the complaint was received and registered by the 2nd Cassation Court of General Jurisdiction on 06.04.2026, the standard routing for a civil cassation complaint in this system, and decided there on 05.05.2026. That docket carries its own dedicated field for matters forwarded to or from Russia’s actual Supreme Court; it reads “none.” Domestic remedies end at this federal cassation stage — there is no evidence of a further escalation.

The appellate court’s stated ground for denial is worth reading slowly, because it is circular. Before HOA “Troianda-M” re-registered in 2024, the demolished property had been formally assigned to the Public-Law Company “Unified Construction Client”ППК «Единый заказчик» — публично-правовая компания, the state demolition operator. The court held that this custodial assignment predates the residents’ association regaining the legal standing to contest it — so the very gap the occupation created, between tearing the building down and letting the residents organize to object, became the reason their objection arrived too late.

The paperwork the denial had to spell out

Court rulings are usually read for their holding. This one is more useful read for its findings of fact: to explain why the residents lose, the appellate court laid out the full administrative sequence that produced the loss. Every date below is drawn directly from the captured ruling text.

Ivanov’s mother, Людмила, is named as also killed 17.03.2022 in the same airstrike but has no row of her own in the source. The underlying spreadsheet and individual Telegram/memorial.ua pages have not yet been hashed into this project’s standard chain of custody — treat as sourced but not yet archive-verified.

Two further irregularities sit in the same file. The technical report underlying the condemnation was challenged by residents for carrying no approval signature; the appellate court noted the objection and relied on the report anyway. And the condemnation paperwork names three different commission rosters across three documents — a composition DNR “State Defense Committee” Resolution No. 162 (the governing demolition procedure) does not permit. The appellate court (case 33-2575/2025) rejected the underlying claim — but without engaging the three-rosters discrepancy itself, on the narrower ground that “the case file contains no evidence the owners sought to take part” in the commission. A related complaint, that the building’s balance-holder was excluded from the commission, was rejected too, on a technicality: at the date of conclusion No. 118 (29.09.2022) the building was assigned to PPK “Edinyi zakazchik,” and TSZh “Troianda-M” did not yet exist.

“KrashMash demolishes Metallurgov 47”

Who physically demolished the building is established directly, from a video uploaded on 14 December 2022 titled “МАРИУПОЛЬ! КРАШМАШ СНОСИТ ЗНАМЕНИТУЮ МНОГОЭТАЖКУ НА МЕТАЛЛУРГОВ!” (“Mariupol! KrashMash demolishes the famous high-rise on Metallurgov!”), carrying on-screen text reading “KrashMash demolishes Metallurgov 47”«…рашМаш» сносит Металлургов 47. The video’s own description dates the start of work to 10 December: “The famous building at Metallurgov 47, whose photographs are known worldwide, has gone under demolition. The company ‘KrashMash’s multi-metre excavator began work on 10 December.”«Знаменитое здание на Металлургов 47, чьи фотографии известны всему миру пошло под снос. Многометровый экскаватор компании «КрашМаш» приступил к работам 10 декабря» A second video, the demolition firm’s own production, opens on a title card — “Demolition of buildings in Mariupol”«СНОС ДОМОВ В МАРИУПОЛЕ» — over its corporate logo. A Ukrainian-language channel’s October 2022 footage labels the same facade, pre-demolition, “проспект Металургів, 47.” Independent sources, different languages, one address.

The physical contractor is KrashMash GroupООО «ГК КрашМаш» (ИНН 7842525925), a St. Petersburg demolition company whose own website describes a 2022 contract to demolish “37 destroyed objects in the center” of Mariupol under the reconstruction program.

A second, independent KrashMash source goes further than the company’s own web copy: a Russian construction-trade-press magazine feature carries an on-the-record interview with general director Viktor KazakovВиктор Александрович Казаков. He states the company’s Mariupol work began October 2022, and that panel buildings up to 40 metres tall are demolished only after Emergencies Ministry and Defense Ministry inspection and resettlement.

That leaves “Severny Veter”«Северный Ветер» — «North Wind» — a name the residents attach to the disputed paperwork side of the story — as the open question, not KrashMash’s role. The most coherent reading across all sources: KrashMash operated the equipment on site in December 2022; the paper trail naming other entities was assembled afterward, the 27 December 2024 contract among it.

A federal developer, and compensation paid in someone else’s home

The land under the cleared lot went, without auction, to the specialized developer SZ “RKS-NR”ООО СЗ «РКС-НР» (ИНН 9310007980, «РКС-Девелопмент»), part of a chain that runs up through RoskapstroyФАУ «РосКапСтрой» — a federal autonomous institution under the Russian Ministry of Construction, a federal institution under the Russian Ministry of Construction. The chain has names and a ceiling:

Named officials and beneficiaries acting in official capacity. See the project’s stakeholder network for the wider developer–ministry graph.

The compensation arithmetic is where the system closes on itself. The occupation’s own compensation rate is 45,000 rubles per square metre; one press report puts the cheapest apartments on the Mariupol market at 53,000 — a roughly 15% shortfall on that single quoted figure. This project checked that claim against its own resale corpus rather than rely on one journalist’s number, and the shortfall is larger: across 266 independently-captured existing-apartment listings, cleaned of duplicate reposts and obvious parsing errors, the compensation rate undershoots even the cheapest 5% of them by 19%, and the citywide median by 43%. And it pays, when it pays at all, in housing drawn from the “ownerless”«бесхозяйное» — the ownerless-property designation stock: the apartments of other displaced Ukrainians who left and have not returned to claim title under Russian jurisdiction. One set of dispossessed residents is offered, as redress, the seized homes of another.

The one file where the dispossessed are on the record fighting

Every other case study in this project documents a seizure the occupier recorded without resistance — a registry entry, a demolition decree, a docket card with no one on the other side. This one documents what happens when residents use the only system left to them. They lost. But in losing they forced the occupation’s own courts to write down the most detailed account of the seizure that exists: a condemnation run with three inconsistent rosters; a technical report a resident flagged as defective and the court leaned on anyway; a contractor relationship formalized by a 103-million-ruble contract two years after the work it supposedly authorized; and a compensation-housing entitlement the administration’s own correspondence concedes went unmet.

It also establishes something a damage assessment or a registry entry cannot: exhaustion of domestic remedies — first instance, appeal, and federal cassation, the full domestic ladder this system provides. That exhaustion is the procedural precondition restitution mechanisms, and the European Court of Human Rights’ own jurisprudence going back to Loizidou, require before a claim becomes admissible. These residents did not skip a step. The occupation courts made a record that they did not.

Residents who are living private individuals are not named here; their words are kept, their identities minimized, per this project’s privacy rule. Named officials, judges, and beneficiaries acting in official capacity are in scope and are named.

Sourcing

Every document, photograph, and video referenced on this page was captured from its original source under this project’s standard chain of custody — a SHA-256 hash and UTC timestamp recorded at retrieval, the raw file preserved before any analysis. The court ruling’s findings of fact are reproducible against the captured ruling text; the address and developer chain are corroborated across press, Telegram, and video sources that do not depend on one another.

Related: the court-docket case study (the uncontested mass route this case is the contested exception to), the master dossier, and the project’s stakeholder network.