Business in Mariupol residents: Russians buy housing and sell it to visitors. Locals are left without homes

Citizens of the Russian Federation are buying up the homes of Mariupol residents who died or were forced to leave the city. Real estate is sold to visiting Russians.

The housing situation in Mariupol is getting worse. What the Russians destroyed cannot be restored. If repairs are carried out, it is partly for a good picture. Locals complain about the quality of such “restoration”. Housing payments are not given to locals, and new apartments are sold as mortgages at exorbitant prices.

A three-room apartment can be bought for $ 35 thousand. At the same time, the property is located in a damaged building. Of the pleasant bonuses – “the elevators don’t work”, the ceiling and walls are cracked, a large number of promises about repairs and the hatred of the locals: “The question remains open, and who exactly sells, because many apartments and houses have been classified as “derelict”. The homes of residents who died or were forced to leave the city are taken away. It is given for accommodation to visiting occupiers, not to locals who have nowhere to live due to the destruction of the city.”

The Rafal Lemkin Warsaw Center for Documentation of Russian Crimes in Ukraine collects stories of Mariupol residents who managed to leave the occupied city.

Their stories are translated and archived so that later these testimonies can be used by historians, scientists and law enforcement officers.

“The Russians, in fact, in order to destroy the traces of their crimes, destroyed all these houses even more and, tearing up with excavator shovels, buried all this construction dirt together with the remains of the bodies of our compatriots,” said the deputy of the Mariupol City Council, Kateryna Sukhomlynova, who for 20 days carried out wounded people from Mariupol under shelling. It was Kateryna who became the first witness of the Lemkin center who agreed to speak openly. Now she is already an employee of this center. Another woman from Mariupol, Natalia, who hid with her children in the basement of the school during the bombing of the city, also openly told her story.

“I’m holding the baby in my arms and the plane is flying. I’m in such fear, I was shaking so much. I even prayed out loud. I begged: “No, no, please no!”. I understood that the bomb from the plane would just tear us to pieces will break and no one will know who is buried in this pit,” the woman said.

Natalia and her children managed to escape. But her husband was captured. Almost one and a half thousand stories about the murders of civilians, torture, rape and deportation have already been heard and recorded at the Center.

“It amazes me that people find the strength to talk about it. To say very scary things in the same breath,” said Anna Berehova, an employee of the Center.

In addition, the team documents the crimes of the Russian army in Ukraine in the de-occupied territories. Some of the testimonies in Poland have already been made public. They were voiced by actors at public events.

“The creation of such an archive, such a repository of war memory will be a form of non-material support for Ukraine. In 10-20 years, these testimonies will fulfill their role, will be a source for researching Russian atrocities, will become a source for writing books, so that this war will be known and remembered on on the basis of individual testimonies of people,” emphasized the head of the Center, Yakub Kersikovskyi.

The so-called “supreme court” of the LРR group sentenced Dmytro Ligusha, a soldier of the National Guard Regiment of Ukraine, and Oleksandr Novik, a soldier of the 24th mechanized brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, to 15 years in prison.

Captured Ukrainian soldiers are accused of “shelling residential buildings” in Severodonetsk.

On May 17, 2022, Oleksandr Novik “fired an RPG-7 hand-held anti-tank grenade launcher at an apartment building located on Gagarin Street.”

On April 17, 2022, Dmytro Ligusha allegedly “fired an RPG-7 hand-held anti-tank grenade launcher at an apartment building located on Gagarin Street.”

The Russians call them “guilty of cruel treatment of the civilian population and the use of prohibited methods in an armed conflict.”