When a house is declared “abandoned”: how Russia seizes the housing of Ukrainians
We look at what international law says about these actions and whether owners can return to their property after deoccupation.
How Ukrainian apartments become “abandoned”
After leaving the occupied city, the apartment or house remains a person’s property, even if they cannot physically return home. However, in territories of Ukraine occupied by Russia, the absence of an owner has become one circumstance under which housing can be included in lists of so-called “unclaimed” property and subsequently come under the control of the occupation administration.
Such cases already number tens of thousands of objects. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, as of November 2025, the occupying authorities had published reports on at least 38,178 residential properties that they considered potentially “abandoned”. In the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, at least 5,557 objects had already been registered as “abandoned”. In December 2025, the relevant rules were enshrined in Russian federal legislation, which also set the deadline for re-registering real estate under Russian rules: July 1, 2026.
The lack of property rights in the Russian registry, long-term non-payment of utility bills, or actual non-use of the premises may be grounds for a housing inspection. The occupation authorities publish information about such apartments, after which the owner is offered the chance to confirm their rights. If he does not do this in the prescribed manner, the housing may be declared “unmanageable” and handed over to the control of the local administration. In practice, this procedure is especially vulnerable for people who have left the occupied territories. Even with Ukrainian documents for the apartment, the occupying authorities can include it in the list of objects that can later be considered “abandoned”.
To register real estate under Russian law, the owner may need to be present in person in the occupied territory or in Russia. For Ukrainians who left because of the war, the return may represent a security threat. At the same time, refusing to meet Russia’s requirements risks losing control of their own housing. The consequences of such a mechanism are also visible in the decisions of courts created by Russia in the occupied territories. Human Rights Watch identified 8,116 published cases related to real estate seizures and analyzed at least 300 decisions. In some cases, the owners were known, had no utility debt, and their relatives or tenants lived in the apartments. However, this did not always prevent the property from being declared “abandoned.”
Recently, the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, Dmytro Lubynets, reported that as of July 20, 2026, the occupation administration included 2,380 apartments and houses in Mariupol in the lists of “unowned” property. According to the occupation authorities, they are referring to real estate whose owners have not confirmed their rights under Russian legislation. Lubynets called this practice a mechanism for forcing Ukrainians to re-register their property rights under the occupying state’s legislation: failure to meet its requirements creates the risk of confiscation of housing and its transfer to other people.
In one case described by Human Rights Watch, in October 2025, the Maritime District Court of Mariupol, created by Russia, considered the case of a Ukrainian citizen whose apartment owner could not appear for re-registration due to her health. According to human rights activists, the court had information about the owner, the absence of debt for utility services, and her living in a relative’s apartment, but decided to hand over the property to the occupation authorities. The arguments included the lack of registration of property rights under Russian law and the redrafting of utility contracts.
How international law protects private property during occupation
When the territory is under occupation, the occupying state gains actual control over it, but does not become its legal owner. Also, occupation does not give the occupying power the right to take apartments, houses, or other private property of the people who lived there at its discretion. Even if the owner left because of hostilities and cannot return home for years, his property rights do not disappear just because he is not in the occupied territory.
The Hague Rules of 1907 protect private property during occupation. Article 46 provides that private property is not subject to confiscation. Article 47 separately prohibits looting. The IV Geneva Convention of 1949 protects property. In particular, Article 53 prohibits the occupying state from destroying private property, except when necessary for military operations. At the same time, this does not mean that the occupation authorities cannot make decisions concerning property at all. They temporarily manage the territory and, under certain circumstances, can establish the rules necessary to ensure the population’s vital activities and public order.
However, a fundamental difference exists between such management and a situation in which a person is permanently evicted from an apartment, and the housing is transferred to the occupation administration or another person. Therefore, the very name “abandoned property”, which is used by the Russian authorities, does not make the apartment such from the point of view of international law. It is important to establish whether it has an owner, why this person is absent, whether they refused housing, and what exactly the occupation authorities did with the property. If the owner left, fleeing hostilities or occupation, this does not, by itself, mean they renounced their property. Accordingly, the procedure introduced by the occupation authorities cannot by itself end the protection that international humanitarian law provides to private property.
Under certain circumstances, illegal possession of property during an armed conflict can also lead to criminal consequences. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court provides for war crimes related to the destruction and appropriation of property, as well as looting. However, including an apartment in the list of “abandoned” does not mean a specific war crime has already been committed: it is important to establish what happened to the property, who decided to seize it, and to whom it was transferred. However, the available data allow us to speak about the systemic nature of this practice. Similar procedures have been introduced in various occupied territories, are regulated by regulations, and implemented through occupation administrations and courts created by Russia. Human Rights Watch characterizes them precisely as Russian “laws and policies” that cover the illegal confiscation of civil property with the “appearance of legality.”
Another legal issue arises when people from Russia are settled in Ukrainian housing. Article 49 IV of the Geneva Convention prohibits the occupying state from moving or relocating part of its own civilian population to the territory occupied by it. The Rome Statute of the ICC also provides for criminal liability for such a transfer by the occupying state of part of its civilian population to the occupied territory. However, the very fact that a Russian citizen moved, for example, to occupied Mariupol, does not automatically mean a violation of this prohibition. Government involvement matters in such a resettlement. In particular, does it encourage people to move to the occupied territories, offer benefits, work, or housing for this, or organize the move and transfer to new residents real estate that previously belonged to Ukrainians? If the housing seized from Ukrainian owners is used to accommodate people whose migration from Russia is supported or stimulated by the state itself, these processes should already be considered in relation to each other. In this case, appropriating real estate may be part of a broader practice aimed at securing the Russian population in the occupied territory.
What can happen to “abandoned” apartments after deoccupation
Under Ukrainian law, bodies created by occupation authorities are illegal, and the acts they issue have no legal effect, except for certain civil-status documents. The law also provides that real estate transactions in occupied territory are invalid if they violate Ukrainian legislation. However, after deoccupation, the problem in practice may be more complicated. Some of the apartments may be destroyed or rebuilt, and new tenants may live in them in the following years. Ukrainians who received them before 2022 and people who received ownership documents from the occupation authorities can have ownership documents for the same housing. Therefore, in addition to restoring Ukrainian registers, the state will have to address the actual return of property, compensation where return is impossible, and the rights of people who were placed in others’ housing during the occupation.
Bosnia and Herzegovina addressed a similar problem after the 1992–1995 war. Hostilities and ethnic cleansing forced more than 2.3 million people to leave their homes, and their apartments and houses were often recognized as “abandoned” by local authorities and given to other people. The new tenants often were refugees and internally displaced persons who themselves lost their homes in another part of the country. After the war, the Dayton Peace Agreement established the right of displaced persons to return to the property they were deprived of, and created a special mechanism to consider such claims. A new tenant in the apartment did not cancel the former owner’s or legal user’s right to demand its return. As of February 2004, more than 201,000 habitable objects were returned to legal claimants.
Another illustrative example is Cyprus. After the Turkish military operation in 1974, many Greek Cypriots lost access to real estate in the north of the island. In Loizidou v. Turkey, the ECHR did not recognize that the de facto authorities’ decisions deprived the applicant of the right to own the land, and it considered the long-term impossibility of using it a violation of her property rights.
International principles of restitution of displaced persons’ property follow similar logic. The so-called Pinheiro Principles of the UN define the return of housing and property as a priority way to restore a violated right, and compensation is primarily a solution when return is impossible or when the owner agrees to compensation. Separately, they regulate the problem of “secondary tenants”: such people cannot be evicted arbitrarily, but protecting their rights should not prevent the timely return of housing to the rightful owner. For those with nowhere to move, the state must find alternative housing. If the real estate was resold to a third party who acted in good faith, the question may be compensation to that person, not depriving the original owner of the right to restitution.
Therefore, after deoccupation, the question is unlikely to be limited to simply canceling Russian records of “unowned” property. It will be necessary to identify the original owners, restore their control over the property, determine the fate of people settled there during the occupation, and, where physical return is impossible, improve compensation mechanisms. Owners of real estate in the occupied territories can submit applications to the International Damage Register for Ukraine under a separate category—about loss of access to real estate or control over it. In total, as of the beginning of September 2026, the Register has received almost 190,000 claims of various types of loss and damage, about 58,000 of which have already been entered in the Register. Payments have not yet been made; the future International Claims Commission for Ukraine should determine the amount of compensation. As of September 11, eight states and the EU had ratified the Convention, and 25 ratifications are required for it to enter into force.
