Author: Guénola Inizan | 02.07.2025
Picture: Law adopted by the People’s Council of the Luhansk People’s Republic on March 27, 2024, concerning ‘the identification, use, and recognition of municipal ownership rights over residential premises considered ownerless within the Republic’s territory’ – Link to law on website of Russian government.
Widely circulated maps of wartime Ukraine often represent Russian-occupied regions as a uniform grey or red zone, potentially creating the illusion of a fixed and homogenous territory. However, beyond being highly contested and deemed temporary by Ukraine, occupation implies a continuous process of erasure carried out by (pro-)Russian administrations. This is exemplified by the dataset constituted by the lists of dwellings classified by the occupying authorities as ‘ownerless properties’. In this blog post, I examine how laws are enacted under Russian occupation, the ‘legal’ definition and procedures concerning so-called ‘ownerless properties’ and, finally, what these lists can reveal.
A ‘legal’ regime of erasure
The outbreak of armed conflict in Donbas in 2014 led to massive displacements, a phenomenon that increased dramatically following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. According to UNHCR, at the beginning of 2025, approximately 3.7 million Ukrainians were internally displaced, while 6.9 million had sought refuge abroad. In this context, the leaders of the self-proclaimed governments of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions camouflaged their expropriation efforts with concerns about ‘abandoned’ houses, as the oppositional journal Novaya Gazeta cites in 2024. Such statements associate residential spaces with emptiness. This obscures the role of warfare in their abandonment and contributes to an erasure regime that echoes patterns observed in other colonial and imperialist contexts.
From 2014 on, the Russo-separatist and Russian administrations in Crimea and the “people’s republics in Donetsk and Luhansk” (DNR and LNR) adopted legal procedures to facilitate the seizure of these dwellings. The term ‘legal’, however, is ambivalent in this context. Under international law, both the self-proclaimed governments of the DNR and LNR (since 2014) and Russia’s annexation of Crimea (2014) and the four Ukrainian regions (2022) are illegal; despite being framed through the instrumentalisation of legal concepts, their law-making bodies are not recognised by most of the international community. Nevertheless, these legal texts de facto shape governance by providing operational mechanisms for the occupying administration.
In addition to being subject to Russian federal laws, each region newly annexed by Russia has its own legal framework, composed of regional laws adopted by local parliaments and decrees of their presidents. In Crimea, beginning in 2014, a legal system was adopted. It combined local laws and decrees to integrate the peninsula into Russian legislation, turning it into a testing ground for property seizures. In the self-proclaimed DNR and LNR, decrees and laws introduced measures addressing property issues, which became more systematic and standardised following their annexation by Russia in September 2022, along with the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
Defining, identifying and registering: the making of lists
Each region has its specificities, but several laws adopted in early 2024 in the four regions annexed by Russia in 2022 share notable similarities. With the exception of Zaporizhzhia, the regional laws adopted by the governments of Donetsk (March 21), Kherson (March 22) and Luhansk (March 27) address ‘the identification, use, and recognition’ of municipal property rights. They outline three main stages for establishing lists of ‘ownerless properties’ by providing a definition of an ‘ownerless property’ and clarifying how to report and register it.
1. Definition: an ‘ownerless property’ can be an individual house, a flat or a room. ‘Signs of an ownerless property’ include a) the absence of payment for communal services for over one year in Donetsk and Luhansk regions and six months in Kherson region, b) the absence of information regarding the property rights in the cadaster register, and c) the absence of use of a dwelling showing signs of potentially dangerous dilapidation.
2. Identification: Individuals or legal entities can report dwellings exhibiting ‘signs of an ownerless property’ to the local Ministry of Property and Land Relations. This Ministry then has to forward the information to federal and regional services in charge of property and cadastral issues. Within ten days, the addresses of potential ‘ownerless properties’ must be published on the local administration’s websites and in an ‘accessible place’ next to the entrance of the dwelling.
3. Registration: The dwelling is registered in the list of ‘ownerless properties’ if no one claims the property and/or the rights of occupancy within 30 days after the publication of its address (which requires, in addition to proof of occupancy and/or property titles, identity papers recognised by the Russian administration) by the Ministry of Property and Land Relations. After that, by following a number of procedures outlined in these decrees, the ministry can transfer it into the municipal housing stock.
New lists of potential ‘ownerless properties’ appear almost daily on the websites of local municipalities in the four recently annexed regions. In May 2024, according to the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, more than 13,000 dwellings had already been recorded, and this number continues to rise. The absence of a unified online register makes it difficult to search for specific addresses. Furthermore, displaced persons are often in precarious situations, and their priorities are focused on daily material concerns in their new places of residence. Finally, reclaiming one’s property requires identity documents recognised by the Russian administration. While obtaining a Russian passport is possible for residents due to the passportisation policy, this implies acknowledging Russian sovereignty over the territory. In this regard, this housing seizure policy plays a role in coercively reinforcing the occupying administrations’ control.
Lists of ownerless properties as valuable data for a critical analysis and documentation of occupation
Social sciences have long demonstrated that legal texts and procedures do not reflect the realities of social practices, and there are many unanswered questions concerning the concrete implementation of the seizures and redistribution of ‘ownerless’ dwellings. How are these dwellings seized in practice and potentially redistributed? In the event of the liberation of these territories, what will become of both former and newly settled residents? This will have to be investigated. However, like any piece of legislation, the lists and their introduction are an emanation of a political and administrative system that they inform about. From this perspective, they are valuable per se. In contrast to other colonial and imperialist contexts where – even if the process is backed by institutions with informal incentives – housing appropriation is not legally implemented to avoid potential sanctions, in Eastern Ukraine, the occupying administration makes it a marker of Russian rule. And the rules and the lists are accessible, although this requires further investigation. Thus, analysing the lists will allow us to define more precisely the temporality, the spaces and the forms in which the Russian occupation of Eastern Ukraine occurs.
Author
Guénola Inizan is a postdoctoral researcher. After defending her PhD thesis in Geography on the “Renovation programme in Moscow” at the Lumière Lyon 2 University (2024), she started researching housing and urban policies in occupied Ukraine at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL). She is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Łódź as part of the NAWA Zawacka programme.
Further readings – recommended by Guénola:
1. David Lewis, Occupation: Russian Rule in South-Eastern Ukraine (London: Hurst). Link to Hurst.
2. Erin Mooney, ‘The Displacement Crisis in Ukraine: Key Legal Issues’, Revue Européenne du Droit 5 (2023) Link to article in Revue Euroéenne du Droit.
3. Europe-Asia Studies 72, 3, Special Issue (Vol.72, Iss.3, 2020), War and Displacement: The Case of Ukraine (2020). Link to Tandfonline
Citation: Inizan, Guénola, Inventorying to Occupy – Lists of ‘ownerless’ dwellings as markers of Russian occupation in Ukraine, KonKoop DataLab Blog, published online: 02/07/2025, https://konkoop.de/index.php/blog/datalab-blog-inventorying-to-occupy-lists-of-ownerless-dwellings-as-markers-of-russian-occupation-in-ukraine/