Forensic case exhibit · Occupied Mariupol
How a destroyed Mariupol home was rebuilt under a new address and sold to the occupier's population.
A 36-apartment, privately owned building was destroyed in 2022, demolished by occupation decree, and replaced on the same footprint by a 51-apartment building registered at a new address — 94.3% of its floor area, per the developer's own live listing feed, sold during construction — while the original owners received no compensation, because on paper their building at Nakhimova Avenue 82 never existed.
01 · The footprint
The destroyed building and its replacement occupy the same ground — their registered coordinates sit roughly 10 metres apart. Only the address, the cadastral record, and the owners changed.
47.0760°N, 37.5125°E · Δ ≈ 10 m
Satellite progression · same footprint
02 · The five-leg lifecycle
Each stage is drawn from a captured Russian-government or occupation record. Read together, they document a single property passing out of its owners' hands and re-emerging under a new identity.
The original building — a multi-unit residential block — stood four storeys high with 36 apartments, held in private ownership by its residents.
The building was gutted during the 2022 siege of Mariupol and recorded as totally destroyed, then queued for clearance under Priority Phase II. Independent satellite corroboration: a Maxar image captured 29 March 2022 (via Esri World Imagery) shows the same gutted shell just days after the siege — matching the occupation's own damage-tracker entry.
What remained was demolished by occupation order DNR “State Defense Committee” Directive No. 56, clearing the site and the paper trail tying it to its owners. The demolition was not a single-building decision: Directive No. 289’s parcel description — “bounded by Nakhimova Avenue and Chernomorskaya Street” — is the footprint of a named, ~36-hectare redevelopment zone (KRT/PPT) covering 9 apartment buildings slated for demolition to make way for >25,000 m² of new construction, confirmed by a Minstroy DNR planning document signed by the ministry’s own head of urban planning, Alexander Avdiyenko. Nakhimova 82 was cleared as part of a zone-level plan, not an isolated case.
Pro-Russian collaborator Oleg Tsarov, former “chairman of the Novorossiya parliament,” published a collection of Mariupol residents’ testimony on his Telegram channel. One directly names this property: “I had an apartment at Nakhimova 82. The building was [an OSMD condo association]. It was demolished, a mortgage-development was built and sold off. Not a single former owner is there now.” Posted 27 December 2023 — two days before the replacement building’s own commissioning date — it describes the demolish→mortgage-sale pattern from the residents’ side, matching what the administrative record proves from the other.
Source Resident comment relayed on t.me/olegtsarov, 27 Dec 2023.A new 5-storey, 51-apartment building, “Dom na Nakhimova”, was commissioned — but registered at the new address Chernomorsky Lane 1B under a new cadastral number 93:37:0010410:173. The land had been leased to the developer without auction (Directive No. 289, 07 Sep 2023, see above).
Apartments sold rapidly — by the developer's own count, 94.3% of floor area by 2026 — largely to Russian buyers using the federal 2% subsidized mortgage open to any Russian citizen. The decree behind that rate, Government Decree No. 2565 (31.12.2022), is now fully captured: its own text confirms “no more than 2 percent per annum,” 10% minimum down payment, and names no residency restriction — any Russian citizen qualifies, not just local residents. In practice that access is largely theoretical for actual former residents — see on-record comments from Mariupol realtors in the master dossier (RU).
The replacement building won a bronze diploma at an architecture competition. Announcing it, the head of Mariupol’s city-planning and architecture department, Natalya Klochkova, praised the architects “working to transform Mariupol into a modern, comfortable Russian city” — a named occupation official, on the record, celebrating the redevelopment of a building whose former owners were dispossessed, and naming the address “Nakhimova, 82” for the new structure.
Source Mariupol occupation TV channel, 3 Oct 2025 (public post).03 · The break in the record
Project name
“Dom na Nakhimova”
Admits the building stands on the Nakhimova site.
Registered address
Chernomorsky Lane 1B
The address break that erases the link to destroyed Nakhimova Avenue 82.
One number stitches the old footprint to the new title. The
cadastral 93:37:0010410:173 appears in both the
land-grant order — the area is bounded by Nakhimova Avenue and Chernomorskaya Street
— and the new building's registration.
04 · The arithmetic of replacement
The original owners receive nothing — on paper, their address no longer exists.
"The property rights of apartment owners … are strictly observed" — so read an official explainer circulated on Mariupol channels on 19 July 2023, naming Nakhimova 82 residents by address among those directed to district social-support offices for compensation under GKO Decree No. 175 (30.07.2022) — a choice between replacement housing built "on the site of the lost property" (§5.3 of the decree) or cash at 35,000 RUB/m² of lost living space. Per the occupation authorities' own 2025 valuation, the average market price of a square meter of housing in the city is 111,038 RUB (composite figure) and 146,205 RUB on the primary market — the cash compensation covers less than a third of the first figure and less than a quarter of the second. Eligibility for compensation is itself conditioned on Russian citizenship: among the documents required to receive a unit, the official published terms of the housing queue demand "original Russian Federation citizen passports of all owners of the property."
Two months later, on 29 September 2023, Mariupol occupation administration head Oleg Morgun personally met with Nakhimova 82 residents and confirmed on the record what the compensation formula leaves unsaid: "construction of a new building is now underway on the site of the demolished one, where apartments can be bought on a mortgage" — almost certainly out of reach for them — and assured them that "they will soon be provided with compensational housing in other new developments," i.e. off-site, contrary to the decree's own §5.3 on-site requirement. The published terms of the housing queue leave the resident no choice of address at all, even among those "other developments": a unit is assigned unilaterally, and the resident may only sign an act of acceptance or an act of refusal. A first refusal sends them to the back of the queue, for another unilateral assignment; a second refusal drops them from the queue entirely, forfeiting in-kind housing and leaving only the cash option — the same option that covers less than a third of market value (above). The promise is worded so that former owners have no claim to specific new apartments at their old address — those units are already sold, or earmarked for sale, to incomers.
05 · Beneficiary of record
Not a single-address developer: reconciling the full DNR land-grant archive found Porfir holds 9 parcels, ~97,000 m² total — almost all one contiguous land assembly in Zhovtnevyi district — making it the single largest developer-beneficiary across the 101 no-tender land grants this project has reconciled. This building is one node in a much larger land assembly by the same beneficiary.
06 · Not an isolated case
Reconciling the full DNR land-grant archive (2026-07-05) surfaced three more Mariupol properties carrying the identical demolish → no-tender-regrant shape documented above — each with a recorded demolition event and a subsequent land grant to a freshly-invoked developer SPV.
Nakhimova 82 remains the reference exhibit because it alone has the full five-leg lifecycle — renamed address, new cadastral number, marketing renders, sales data — captured end-to-end. Unlike Nakhimova 82, these three keep their original street address on the regrant decree, so address-laundering specifically is unconfirmed for them; the underlying demolish → regrant pattern holds regardless. What this confirms is that the modality is a repeating occupation practice, not a one-off.
07 · Legal mapping
A3.6 — loss of access to property in occupied territory.A3.1 — destruction of residential property.A3.3 — loss of housing / residence.8(2)(b)(viii) — transfer of the occupier's own population.8(2)(a)(iv) — appropriation of property.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.