Hundreds Of Ukrainian Homes In Crimea Seized As Russian Property

“I’m your neighbor, Volodya. Your apartments have been sold. Call me — it’s urgent.”

When that message reached Svitlana Kolisnichenko and her family in May 2024, it confirmed their worst fears about the property they left behind in Crimea after moving to Kyiv.

Since the initial illegal Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014 — and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — hundreds of buildings, homes, and other properties in Crimea have been seized by Russian authorities, according to international rights observers.

In Kolisnichenko’s case, they learned that a former Ukrainian soldier who was now a Russian citizen was living in their three-room apartment without their consent. He was also registering his children and wife as residents there.

The new tenant was certainly not paying the Kolisnichenkos’ rent.

“I think our neighbor, Lyudmila, and her husband, Vitaliy, gave him the keys,” Kolisnichenko said. “She must have started renting out our apartment or something.”

She says she only found out about this when Volodya called her to tell her that Lyudmila “was letting strangers into the apartment, including military men.”

“In my building, where we used to live, there are already seven such apartments. It turns out this is something of a mass phenomenon,” Kolisnichenko said.

According to rights organizations, the seizure of properties belonging to Ukrainians who oppose Russian occupation has been systematic and on a mass scale.

Those like Kolisnichenko who refused the offer of Russian passports have been a frequent target, it seems.

“We were against Russia’s policies — that’s why we didn’t take a passport, that’s the only reason,” Kolisnihenko said. “I had the full right to get a passport and my mother is in Russia, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t like this aggression.”

The policy has cost hundreds of Ukrainians their homes and buildings, say observers.

“If [countries] treat Russian aggression unfavorably and impose sanctions, then [its] citizens will be considered unfriendly,” said Mykyta Petrovets of the nonprofit Regional Center for Human Rights. In cases like this, under Russian law, “the corresponding confiscation of property can take place.”

Many Ukrainian property owners were given about a year either to transfer or sell their properties, Petrovets said, after which “forced sales through court orders began. Now such plots are being sold at auctions. From this perspective, their property is effectively being expropriated as well.”

Yulia Stezhko, whose family invested in a plot of land in Crimea and planned a house there, discovered it had been seized by a court decree after they left the peninsula.

The land, which she described as being “with a view of the sea, generally a nice property,” is a significant loss.

“We bought it with the savings of the whole family,” she says, adding they had hoped their children’s vacations would be spent there in accordance with family tradition.

“Besides, my maternal grandfather is buried there,” she says.

When she inquired with the authorities in Crimea, Stezhko was told “that a decree had come into effect, according to which I had no rights to the property, and that’s it.”

In 2023, the Russian-installed authorities in Crimea announced their intention to sell around 1,000 properties, including the apartment in Yalta belonging to Olena Zelenska, the wife of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which was sold for 44 million rubles ($530,000).

By the end of 2023, more than 2,600 assets belonging to Ukrainians had been illegally appropriated, an investigation by RFE/RL’s Crimea.Realities has shown.

Russia No Longer Bound By ECHR

In March 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree pronouncing nearly all of Crimea a so-called border territory of Russia. That act prohibited “foreign citizens,” including Ukrainians, from owning land in occupied Crimea.

Under Ukrainian law, nothing has changed; the property ownership of Ukrainians is still fully recognized. But Russian-installed officials in Crimea have published long lists of addresses and titles of plots of land they plan to seize.

The Regional Center for Human Rights has documented that, in just three years, the number of plots owned by so-called foreign citizens in Crimea has decreased by 50 percent — from over 11,000 to 5,000.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has sued over the land seizures and declared the Russian policy illegal. But in 2022, Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe and is no longer a party to the European Convention on Human Rights, meaning its government is no longer legally bound by the court’s rulings.

The Russian authorities have since declared that decisions by the ECHR will not be enforced.

Some 1,101 lawsuits filed by Ukrainians with the ECHR over human rights violations in occupied Crimea remain on record, more than half over the expropriation of property./Rferl/