‘We have nowhere to return to’: How Russia is seizing homes in occupied Ukraine
When evangelical pastor Ihor Ivashchuk fled his home in occupied Ukraine four years ago, he asked a lifelong friend to live there and look after it until he could safely return.
But when his friend called to say a man clad in military fatigues had turned up on the doorstep asking who owned the property and whether he could see ownership documents, Ivashchuk knew his home in Melitopol was likely lost.
The pastor had been forced to leave the occupied city in southern Ukraine in September 2022, in part to seek medical help for his wife. By that time, Russian troops wielding assault rifles had already disturbed his congregation by storming into his church in the middle of a service.
He spent the next two years rebuilding his life elsewhere in Ukraine away from Moscow’s control, but the stories of the Kremlin seizing people’s homes under the occupation and redistributing them to Russian citizens hadn’t escaped him.
The call he received about his own home in late 2024 came as little surprise. Within months he said his friend had been evicted and the house - which Ivashchuk had spent more than 20 years renovating with his own hands - no longer belonged to him.
Ivashchuk’s story is just one of thousands in occupied Ukraine, where Moscow has installed officials to run the parts of four illegally annexed regions - Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia - that it controls.
A BBC Verify and BBC Russian investigation has combed through hundreds of records and has found that 34,002 properties belonging to Ukrainian citizens - including apartments, houses and holiday homes - have been seized or identified for seizure since 2024 so they can be given to Russian passport holders. In some cases the homes can be temporarily leased to local officials such as judges, soldiers and state workers.
Moscow-installed officials have also targeted thousands of businesses, such as offices and hotels, but they have not been included in our count.
Ukrainians are rarely notified when their homes are being seized, which are usually identified because the property is not registered with Russian authorities. Instead people have to trawl through online registers of properties that Russian officials have declared are “ownerless” or “potentially ownerless” to see if their properties are listed.
Ukrainian citizens displaced by fighting have to obtain Russian passports, return to the occupied regions in person within 30 days, and risk arrest by passing through a gruelling security screening process at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport to prevent their property from falling into Russian state control.
Among the properties targeted is a family home in Mariupol’s suburbs. The daughter of the owner - who we are calling Ivanna to protect her family members still living in occupied Ukraine - told BBC Verify that her father had spent 15 years building it as a refuge for her mother after she was diagnosed with cancer.
“The doctor said she could not breathe the Mariupol air anymore, so she needed to be taken somewhere near the forest,” Ivanna said. “Once we finished it, Mum left us - passed away. But still, it remained our family house.”
Ivanna’s family fled Mariupol shortly after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, but her grandparents have remained in the house. However, in April, occupation officials appeared on the doorstep to tell them the home had been identified for seizure. BBC Verify has seen photos of the home but has chosen not to publish them to protect Ivanna’s family.
“It is a house that was built for my mum, where she lived, and it is the place of our memories. Of my childhood... of time spent together as a family,” Ivanna said. “I just can't imagine someone else living there.”
A spokesperson for the Russian embassy in London said the measures “establish procedures for managing residential property whose owners cannot be identified or contacted, while also providing for compensation should the lawful owners subsequently come forward”.
The seizure of Ukrainian homes has been introduced at the same time that historic streets have been renamed for Soviet-era figures, while the use of the Ukrainian language has effectively been banned in schools by occupation authorities.
Even the church that Ivashchuk preached at, an evangelical congregation called the Church of Grace, has not been spared. The ornate building has been converted into an outpost for Russia’s culture ministry and its exterior repainted and adorned with large murals of Russian soldiers.
Dr Jaroslava Barbieri, a research fellow at Chatham House, said this Russian strategy of “demographic engineering” is designed to transform both the social and political fabric of the occupied regions, “making their future reintegration into Ukraine both politically undesirable and practically hard to reverse”.
She added: “Domestically, it helps to consolidate the Kremlin’s imperial narrative that the expansion of the Russian Federation to include these territories - often referred to as ‘new regions’ in Russian - is a fait accompli and a force for good”.
The Russian embassy denied this, instead accusing the Ukrainian government of the “systematic marginalisation of the Russian language, the erosion of the rights of Russian-speaking communities and attempts to erase their cultural identity”, which it claimed were the “root cause” of the war.
Putin’s law is sold as a way to offer alternative accommodation to people living in the occupied territories whose homes have been destroyed by fighting, but the offer only applies to people who have agreed to become Russian citizens.
Yet there appears to be some Russian citizens who have benefited from the scheme that are uncomfortable with the way it is being run. Telegram chats from Mariupol show some residents trying to find out whether the apartments they had been allocated were truly “ownerless”.
Redacted Name ###, apt ###, looking for the owner
Redacted ### apt ## - looking for the owner. Please, make yourself known if there are owners!
Redacted name ### apt ## - looking for owners. Please, make yourselves known. The flat has been given as compensation
Redacted Name ### # apt ## Looking for the owner
Looking for owners, Redacted ### apt ## , has been given as compensation
The Ukrainian government has its own compensation scheme for people who have been displaced by the conflict, which includes those whose homes have been seized. But some of the Ukrainians who spoke to BBC Verify said they had struggled to find new housing within a slow-moving system aimed at relocating millions of people who have had to flee their homes.
Myla, whose full name we are not revealing for safety reasons, is originally from Mariupol but now lives elsewhere in Europe. She submitted evidence to the Ukrainian government showing damage to her flat but said she has heard nothing from the authorities. She said that while some wealthy Ukrainian donors have separately provided compensation to a number of wounded fighters her family does not qualify for this.
“I’ve realised that - probably - no-one will compensate me with anything,” Myla said. “We are not homeless. We are people who want to live in Ukraine, rebuild it and everything else, but we have nowhere to return to.”
Ivanna is unsure what the current status of her home is. But, living thousands of miles from Ukraine, she fears that there is little hope she will see it again.
“I do not believe that if they do take the house… under the conditions we are living in now, it will be possible to get it back,” she said, resigned to the reality that unless Ukraine can retake vast swathes of Russian-captured territory, her childhood home is all but lost.
Meanwhile, Ivashchuk is also unsure who now lives in his home. He said he felt conflicted about his experience of losing his home. As a Christian, he said, it was important that he could forgive the man who claimed his house and evicted his friend.
But he also questioned the desire of someone “to improve one’s own condition at the expense of another person”, which he described as “lawlessness”.
“For me, as a believer, it’s a sin.”
A note on methodology
The BBC found 34,002 unique addresses by assessing 516 publicly available “ownerless property” lists on official occupied territories websites. A total of 14,308 were in Mariupol and 19,694 were in the other parts of the occupied territories.
We removed non-residential addresses from our count and then standardised the format of the remaining addresses. This was to ensure that each individual home was only counted once, even if it appeared at multiple stages in the process.
We also removed any home which was later listed as an exclusion by local authorities as this usually means the owner has been able to prove their property rights in person.
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