Mariupol in the Shadows: Reconstructing a City While Erasing Its Past
By Matthew Parish
Sunday 25 October 2026
Four years after the Russian siege of Mariupol, one of the greatest difficulties facing journalists attempting to understand the fate of this once prosperous Ukrainian industrial city is that the truth has become fragmented. Russian authorities broadcast pictures of newly constructed apartment buildings, repaired roads and reopened public institutions. Ukrainian sources describe confiscated homes, demographic change, political repression and the progressive destruction of the city’s Ukrainian identity. Somewhere between the competing narratives lies the everyday experience of those who remain in Mariupol: people who must find water, employment, medical treatment and education for their children while living in a city whose political, economic and social structures have been transformed by occupation.
A recent private communication received by the Lviv Herald illustrates both the opportunities and the difficulties involved in investigating contemporary Mariupol. A woman identifying herself as being from the city offered to introduce this newspaper to the female rector of a Mariupol university displaced to Dnipro, describing her as an award-winning academic who has worked to preserve her institution and develop international relationships since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The message contains no allegations about events inside occupied Mariupol and provides no direct evidence about contemporary living conditions there. It should therefore be treated not as intelligence establishing facts about the occupation but as a potentially valuable introduction to one of the displaced institutions through which Mariupol’s surviving social and intellectual networks are maintained.
There is substantial public evidence supporting the central part of the introduction. Pryazovskyi State Technical University was displaced from Mariupol to Dnipro after the full-scale invasion. Its rector is Professor Olena Khadzhynova, a doctor of economics who took charge of the institution in 2022. In an interview published in March 2026, she described the university’s relocation from Mariupol and its subsequent reconstruction as an institution in Dnipro. The university’s own website independently identifies her as its rector. The description provided by the anonymous correspondent is therefore sufficiently plausible to justify pursuing the proposed introduction, although the identity of the person intended by the correspondent should still be confirmed directly rather than inferred from public information.
The significance of such a contact goes considerably beyond the administration of a university. Institutions displaced from occupied territory maintain networks of former residents, students, academics and families divided by the front line. They can provide evidence about patterns of displacement, the continuing connections between occupied Mariupol and government-controlled Ukraine and the ways in which people who have lost their physical city attempt to preserve its civic institutions elsewhere. They may also be able to introduce journalists to witnesses whose individual accounts can subsequently be tested against documentary and open-source evidence.
To understand why such testimony matters, one must return to the destruction of Mariupol in 2022. The siege was one of the most devastating episodes of the full-scale invasion. Residential districts, infrastructure, industrial facilities and public buildings suffered enormous destruction. The precise number of civilians killed remains disputed and may never be known with certainty because the city fell under Russian control before a comprehensive independent investigation could take place. Any responsible account must therefore distinguish between documented deaths, estimates derived from burial records or satellite imagery and much larger figures that have circulated without adequate independent verification.
What is not seriously in doubt is the physical devastation of the city and the mass displacement that accompanied it. Nor is it seriously in doubt that substantial reconstruction has subsequently taken place. Apartment buildings have been constructed or repaired, roads have been resurfaced and Russian authorities have invested heavily in presenting Mariupol as an example of successful reconstruction. It would be a mistake for Ukrainian journalism simply to deny that these works exist. The more important question is who benefits from them, who owns the reconstructed property and what has happened to the rights of the hundreds of thousands of people who fled the city.
Here the independent evidence becomes considerably stronger. In March 2026, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine published a detailed report on displacement from Russian-occupied territory. It found that Russian authorities had instituted procedures for designating privately owned homes as potentially “abandoned”, requiring owners to appear personally and register their property within the Russian legal system. According to the UN, more than 38,000 apartments and houses across occupied Ukrainian territory had been identified in such notices since February 2022. More than 13,700 of those properties were in Mariupol.
The next stage is even more significant. The UN reported that at least 6,156 properties had actually been registered as “abandoned”, with more than 80 per cent of them situated in Mariupol. These are extraordinary figures. They suggest that the transformation of property ownership in Mariupol is not an incidental consequence of reconstruction but one of the central features of the post-siege city.
Human Rights Watch independently investigated the same system. In May 2026 it reported that Russian occupation authorities were using an opaque administrative process to designate property as “ownerless” and subsequently transfer it into municipal ownership. Although Russian legislation does not formally state in every instance that Ukrainian citizenship extinguishes ownership rights, Human Rights Watch found that Ukrainian passport holders faced severe practical obstacles to registering their property. Interviewees described Russian citizenship as operating in practice as a prerequisite for successfully navigating the system.
One case documented by Human Rights Watch involved a 74-year-old woman who had fled Mariupol in 2022 and subsequently travelled from Germany in an attempt to protect her apartment. Officials reportedly refused to accept her Ukrainian passport for registration purposes, and she eventually obtained a Russian passport because she believed that otherwise she would lose her home. Whatever political conclusions one draws from the wider conflict, this is an important illustration of why possession of a Russian passport in occupied territory cannot automatically be interpreted as evidence of political allegiance.
The system also places displaced owners in an obvious dilemma. To protect their homes they may have to travel through Russia, submit themselves to security screening, enter occupied territory and deal personally with institutions whose authority Ukraine and most of the international community do not recognise. Some cannot travel because of age, health or financial circumstances. Others may fear detention or questioning because of their political opinions, military connections or public activities. Failure to undertake that journey can then contribute to their property being treated as abandoned.
More recent reporting suggests that confiscated property is no longer merely accumulating on municipal registers but is being redistributed. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported in October 2026 that the Russian-appointed administration claimed to have distributed approximately 5,500 apartments in Mariupol between May and September to residents whose own homes had been destroyed during the fighting. According to that reporting, the properties being allocated were not principally newly constructed apartments but homes whose previous owners had died, left for government-controlled Ukraine or moved abroad and whose property had subsequently been designated “ownerless”.
This creates a morally and legally extraordinary situation in which one victim of the destruction of Mariupol may be compensated using the property of another displaced victim. The recipient may herself have lost everything in 2022 and may have no realistic alternative accommodation. The absent owner may meanwhile be living as a refugee in Kyiv, Germany or elsewhere in Europe while still considering the apartment to be her home. The resulting conflict is not principally between those two civilians. It is created by an administrative system that purports to extinguish or reallocate property rights under conditions of military occupation.
This is one reason why the visual reconstruction of Mariupol can be misleading. A repaired apartment block may indeed represent improved living conditions for the person now occupying it. At the same time, its legal history may involve displacement, contested ownership and the inability of the original proprietor to return. A photograph of a freshly painted building cannot tell us who owned the apartments before 2022, where those people now live or whether they consented to what subsequently happened to their homes.
The problems extend beyond property. United Nations monitoring has documented serious difficulties with basic infrastructure across occupied Donetsk region. During 2025, Russian occupation authorities introduced water rationing amid shortages attributed to wartime damage, inadequate infrastructure maintenance and dry weather. In some areas residents received running water only once every three days or less, while complaints concerned water quality and insufficient pressure for ordinary domestic sanitation. These findings do not establish that every district of Mariupol experiences identical conditions, but they provide independent support for treating reports of continuing utility problems seriously.
Social media can be particularly useful in examining such questions, provided that it is used cautiously. Local Telegram channels, including channels broadly sympathetic to or controlled by the occupation authorities, regularly publish notices about water interruptions, electricity repairs, road works, housing allocation and municipal services. Such material has considerable evidential value precisely because mundane administrative announcements are less likely to have been created for an international propaganda audience. A notice announcing that water will be turned off in a particular district for repairs may tell us more about the everyday functioning of the city than an ideological statement by either Moscow or Kyiv.
Yet social media must not be mistaken for independent corroboration merely because the same claim appears repeatedly. Ten Telegram channels may all be reproducing one original post. A photograph may be genuine but several years old. A video may show Mariupol but not the district or date claimed in the accompanying caption. Responsible open-source investigation therefore requires locating the earliest available version, examining landmarks and environmental details, comparing imagery with maps and satellite photographs where possible and determining whether ostensibly different reports ultimately derive from the same source.
The demographic transformation of Mariupol presents an even greater evidential challenge. Russian authorities have promoted reconstruction and settlement while offering preferential financial arrangements for property purchases in occupied territories. Human Rights Watch reports that Russian authorities have promoted the relocation of Russian citizens to Mariupol, including through media campaigns and low-interest mortgages. International humanitarian law imposes particular restrictions upon an occupying power transferring parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory, which makes the scale and character of such migration a matter of considerable legal as well as political importance.
Nevertheless, precise claims about the proportion of Mariupol’s present population originating in Russia should be treated cautiously. There has been no independently verifiable census under conditions in which international observers can freely investigate the city. Population estimates offered by Russian officials, Ukrainian authorities, residents and commentators vary substantially. It is therefore safer to say that there is credible evidence of inward migration from Russia and substantial outward displacement of Mariupol’s pre-war population than to assign a supposedly precise percentage to either phenomenon without stronger evidence.
This distinction is especially important because Mariupol was overwhelmingly Russian-speaking before the invasion. Language cannot sensibly be used as a proxy for political allegiance. A Russian-speaking Ukrainian whose family has lived in Mariupol for generations and a Russian citizen who moved there after 2022 may use the same language while having entirely different relationships with the city, the Ukrainian state and the occupation authorities. Any serious investigation of demographic change must therefore examine citizenship, previous residence and patterns of migration rather than linguistic identity alone.
Education provides another means by which occupation alters a society. The United Nations has documented the introduction of Russian curricula and intensified “patriotic education” throughout occupied Ukrainian territory. Its reporting describes educational programmes directed even at very young children and militarised activities involving older pupils. These policies matter because occupation is not merely a question of which flag flies above an administrative building. Over time, schools shape historical memory, political vocabulary and the identity through which a generation understands the society to which it belongs.
This is precisely why the survival of Mariupol’s displaced Ukrainian universities matters. A university is not merely a collection of lecture halls. It consists of teachers, students, archives, traditions, qualifications, professional relationships and institutional memory. When an institution escapes an occupied city and reconstructs itself elsewhere, it preserves part of the civic identity of the place from which it came.
Pryazovskyi State Technical University provides an important example. Its rector has publicly described the chaotic circumstances in which the university was displaced and the subsequent effort to rebuild it in Dnipro. An interview with her could therefore illuminate not only the history of one educational institution but the wider experience of Mariupol’s dispersed academic community. It may also provide introductions to students, teachers and families whose experiences connect the occupied city with government-controlled Ukraine.
Such interviews nevertheless require methodological discipline. An academic administrator living in Dnipro cannot automatically be treated as an eyewitness to present conditions in Mariupol. A former resident communicating with relatives inside the city may possess valuable information but is still reporting at second hand. A person currently inside Mariupol may have direct knowledge but may also be unable to speak freely. Each category of witness therefore contributes a different sort of evidence.
The same principle applies to anonymous communications. The message received by the Lviv Herald is potentially useful because parts of its description can be compared with publicly verifiable facts and because it may lead to identifiable people who can be interviewed. It should not, however, be described as corroboration of unrelated allegations about Mariupol merely because its author says she is from the city. Authentication of a source and verification of the source’s individual claims are separate exercises.
Particular caution is necessary when dealing with people who remain under occupation. Apparently innocuous details about employment, family relationships, neighbourhoods or patterns of movement may permit identification. Photographs can contain recognisable buildings, faces or metadata. Screenshots may reveal usernames and telephone numbers. Even the timing of communications can sometimes disclose information about a source. The journalistic value of a detail must therefore always be balanced against the possibility that publishing it could expose somebody to interrogation or retaliation.
There is another methodological temptation that should be resisted. Because Russia is responsible for the occupation, it does not follow that every Russian source is false. Russian administrative documents may provide the best evidence that a particular property has been classified as ownerless. Local occupation media may inadvertently provide useful evidence about water shortages or unfinished construction. Property advertisements can reveal who is being encouraged to purchase apartments. Propaganda itself may contain verifiable facts, provided that the factual component is separated from the political interpretation placed upon it.
Likewise, Ukrainian sources should not be accepted automatically merely because their general account of the occupation is consistent with independently documented abuses. Ukraine is fighting a war for national survival and its institutions understandably communicate within that context. Strong journalism serves Ukraine better by distinguishing what is proved from what is probable and what remains merely alleged. Credibility accumulated through restraint is particularly valuable when reporting from territories to which independent journalists have little or no safe access.
What, then, can reasonably be said about Mariupol in late 2026? There is strong evidence that Russia has undertaken substantial physical reconstruction. There is equally strong evidence that this reconstruction is accompanied by a large-scale reorganisation of property rights under which thousands of homes belonging to displaced people have been classified as abandoned or ownerless. There is credible evidence of continuing infrastructure difficulties, political and educational integration into Russian systems and inward migration from Russia. There is also overwhelming evidence that a large proportion of Mariupol’s pre-war population remains displaced.
What cannot presently be established with equivalent confidence is the precise demographic composition of the city, the political opinions of those who remain, the proportion of reconstruction benefiting original residents rather than newcomers or the degree to which everyday dissatisfaction translates into opposition to Russian rule. These are exactly the questions upon which interviews with displaced institutions, recent arrivals from Mariupol and carefully protected contacts inside the city may prove valuable.
The probable reality is therefore more complicated than either of the simplest propaganda narratives. Mariupol is neither an untouched wasteland nor an uncomplicated showcase of successful Russian reconstruction. It is a functioning but profoundly transformed occupied city. Buildings are being repaired while ownership is being contested. Infrastructure is being restored while parts of it remain unreliable. New inhabitants are arriving while many former inhabitants cannot return. Schools and universities operate on opposite sides of the front line, teaching different accounts of the country to which Mariupol belongs.
There is a temptation, when describing a city that has suffered on Mariupol’s scale, to interpret the continuation of ordinary life as evidence of political acquiescence. That would be a mistake. Human beings work, shop, marry, educate their children and repair their homes under almost every conceivable political system. A resident who accepts an apartment from the occupation authorities may simply need somewhere to live. A displaced owner who obtains Russian documents to preserve a family home may be making a practical decision rather than expressing political loyalty.
The reverse assumption is equally dangerous. Not every complaint about water, wages or housing demonstrates organised Ukrainian resistance. People complain about municipal government everywhere. Some residents may support Russian rule, others may oppose it and many may concentrate principally upon surviving circumstances over which they have little control. Journalism should resist transforming every mundane grievance into evidence for a predetermined political conclusion.
The proposed introduction to a displaced Mariupol academic in Dnipro is therefore worth pursuing precisely because it may allow a more sophisticated investigation. Through the university and its networks, it may be possible to locate former residents, compare accounts, identify documentary evidence and understand how relationships with the occupied city have survived. Each subsequent claim can then be tested independently rather than incorporated wholesale into a narrative merely because the source appears sympathetic or credible.
Mariupol is no longer only a story about the siege of 2022. It has become a story about what happens after conquest: who owns the houses, who teaches the children, who controls the archives, who arrives to replace those who fled and whether the displaced retain meaningful rights to return. Physical reconstruction is one part of that story, but reconstruction of buildings is not synonymous with restoration of the society that inhabited them.
The struggle over Mariupol is therefore increasingly a struggle over memory, property and identity. Russia can rebuild roads and apartment blocks far more quickly than it can erase the legal claims, personal histories and cultural connections of the people who lived there before the invasion. The continuing existence of Mariupol’s displaced institutions demonstrates that a city can survive beyond its physical boundaries. Whether those institutions and their people will one day return is unknowable. But any serious account of Mariupol’s future must begin by remembering that a reconstructed city and a restored community are two very different things.
