Newly built apartments with panoramic city views are being marketed with 3D animated visualizations of modern buildings with neat surroundings. Real estate companies are trying to lure Russian buyers to new apartments where Mariupol residents' homes have been bombed to pieces.
"If you have been thinking about owning your own apartment by the sea, now is the best opportunity to make your dream come true," says information from the property developer for one of the projects, which has been named Mirapolis.
The message is aimed at Russian citizens, who are being lured into moving into Mariupol on the Sea of Azov with offers of very favorable loans. The journalist network Bellingcat has identified 23 multi-storey apartment complexes, over 50 buildings with at least 6,000 apartments – which are being built on the ruins of Mariupol.
New street names
Large parts of the city still consist of ruins. A Ukrainian living in the city told the BBC this summer that what is shown on Russian television is “fairy tales for fools.”
They are repairing the facades of the buildings along the main streets, where they bring cameras to film. But around the corner there is only rubble and emptiness. Many people still live in half-destroyed apartments with walls that are barely standing, he says.
In some of the newly built houses, new residents have already moved in, while the original Ukrainian owners cannot return. Streets have been renamed, Ukrainian monuments have been removed and murals have been painted over. Access to Ukrainian websites has been blocked and Russian television is shown.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, bloody fighting erupted in Mariupol, on the coast east of Crimea. The important port city, previously home to 430,000 people, was surrounded in just a few days and a large part of the population was forced to flee.
The fighting has been described as the bloodiest in Europe since World War II.
Mass graves
It was here that the famous images of pregnant women being carried out of a hospital damaged in an airstrike in March 2022 came from. It was here that several hundred people were killed while taking shelter from Russian attacks in the city's theater that same month. It was here that the outside world held its breath as Ukrainian soldiers defended the city's massive Azovstal steelworks until May of that year.
In addition to all the homes that were destroyed, access to food, water, electricity and heating was cut off for the population, as well as internet and telephony.
After an 86-day siege, the city fell into Russian hands. Shortly afterwards , the UN human rights office estimated in a statement that up to 90 percent of the city's residential buildings were damaged or destroyed, and that 350,000 people were estimated to have been forced to leave the city.
Around 25,000 people are believed to have been killed in Mariupol. Many of them are buried in mass graves.
New theater
The exact number of people killed when the theater in Mariupol was bombed has not yet been determined. Ukrainian authorities stated ten days after the attack that around 300 people were killed. According to an assessment published in May of that year , the AP news agency estimated that nearly 600 people were killed inside and outside the theater.
What was left of the bombed building began to be demolished in December 2022, and Russia has now built a new theater in its place. The first performances have already been announced. The audience will see a vaudeville called “The Empress’s Favorite” and listen to the concert “One Love – One Russia,” reports Ukrainian Suspilne .
The theater's website states: "Once again, as so many times before, the theater is reborn together with Mariupol," reports The Times .
“The future of Russia”
In the northeastern part of the city is the largest Russian construction project – the Leningrad District – with eleven high-rise buildings. It was recently announced that four more buildings will be built here.
“We are building the future of Russia,” it says on the developer's website.
But for Ukrainian residents who survived the siege, or who have returned to the city, it is not easy to find a place to live. Property registers have been destroyed or missing, so it is difficult to prove ownership. And to claim your old home in the Russian-occupied area and avoid it being classified as “ownerless” and confiscated, you must become a Russian citizen and personally present proof of ownership.
The Russian authorities have stated that residents who have lost their homes in the war will be compensated, but the amounts are nowhere near the prices of the cheapest apartments in the newly built buildings.
"We are not asking for favors, but for the law and promises made to be followed," a Ukrainian woman in Mariupol tells Bellingcat.
We are asking to receive the housing we were promised, not an offer of a mortgage for our own house or someone's "ownerless" apartment.
On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine, having already entered the neighboring country in 2014, which then led to the annexation of the Crimean peninsula and a largely frozen conflict in Donbass in the east.
In a planned lightning offensive from the north, east and south, the Russian forces met resistance. They did not reach Kiev, but advanced along the southern coast to the Crimean peninsula. The coastal city of Mariupol fell after a long and bloody siege.
Ukraine carried out two counteroffensives in the fall of 2022, retaking the Kharkiv region in the northeast and the city of Kherson and its surroundings in the south. In connection with this, Russia announced that it would annex the only partially occupied regions of Kherson, Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhia.
A major Ukrainian counteroffensive was launched in the summer of 2023, but failed to break through the then-fortified Russian defenses. In August 2024, Ukrainian forces entered Russia and occupied part of the Kursk region.
Russia has regularly attacked locations across Ukraine with missiles and drones. Up to 15,000 civilians have been confirmed by the UN to have been killed in the war (as of November 2025), but the undercount is believed to be large. Several million Ukrainians have fled abroad.
