БЕСХОЗЯЙНАЯ

Before 24 February 2022, Mariupol was ordinary in the way cities are ordinary: iron and steel works, a deep-water harbour, a university, an iconic drama theatre, the bus you took to work. That ordinariness is worth holding onto — because what follows is an administrative machine built to erase it from the record.

Russia’s full-scale invasion began on 24 February 2022, and the assault on Mariupol began the same day. Within days the city was encircled. By 2 March it had lost power, water, and sanitation; hundreds of thousands were trapped for weeks in basements without heat, telephone, or any reliable news of what was happening above them. On 9 March a strike hit a children’s and maternity hospital. On 16 March the Drama Theatre — the city’s main shelter, with ДЕТИ (“CHILDREN”) painted in letters large enough to read from orbit — was bombed; estimates of the dead there run from a dozen to roughly six hundred.

The human toll has never been fully counted, and the range is itself part of the record: the UN verified roughly 1,348 civilian deaths as a floor; Human Rights Watch, from satellite imagery of grave sites, estimated more than 8,000; Ukrainian officials say 25,000 or more. The UN assessed that up to 90 percent of the city’s multistorey residential buildings were damaged or destroyed. Of the half-million who had lived there, perhaps 150,000 remained by May, when the city fell. The displaced — scattered across Ukraine, Russia, and the world — are the dispossessed owners at the centre of everything that follows.

What came next was not reconstruction. It was a change of sovereign, imposed by law. On 30 September 2022 Russia declared annexation, formalised by federal constitutional law Federal Constitutional Law No. 5 of 4 October 2022, making Russian civil, land, and housing law applicable in Mariupol. The ruble, the passport, the registry followed. The city was renamed into a Russian administrative object, its streets re-lettered, its cadastre re-drawn — and its residents re-classified as people who must now prove, under the rules of the power that destroyed their city, that what was theirs is still theirs.

The Greek arkhē names at once the commencement and the commandment. Jacques Derrida · Archive Fever, 1995

Derrida traced the word archive to the arkheion — the house of the archons, the magistrates who commanded, where the official documents were kept and, crucially, interpreted. To hold the archive is to hold the power to decide what is recorded, what is recognised, and what is allowed to disappear. This is a precise description of what the occupation has built. It has seized the archons’ house. It has made itself the sole keeper and interpreter of the record of who owns what — and under the December 2025 amendment, inclusion in the registry is title. The entry in the list now is the law it speaks. The same apparatus that inscribes — twelve thousand homes entered as “ownerless” — also erases: it demolishes the building, renames the street, breaks the address, so that the destroyed property, on paper, no longer exists.