On the one hand, authorities are demanding that owners show up within 30 days, says a 75-year-old from Sievierodonetsk, according to HRW.
But no one is let through the filtering process.
According to HRW's findings, the Russian occupation regime classifies properties as "potentially abandoned", then "ownerless", which means the municipality takes them over. And to contest this, you have to quickly go to court, which often proves impossible for someone who has not changed their citizenship from Ukrainian to Russian.
HRW estimates that this has been done in thousands of cases, and that in the future it could be tens of thousands.
