OVER THE past few months, little white notices have appeared on doorways to residential blocks all over Mariupol, a city besieged, wrecked and then seized by Russia in May 2022. “An inventory of your block will be carried out to identify ownerless property; the owner of the apartment should be at home with documents and a Russian passport.” The print is small, the implications large. Unless the apartments are re-registered with the Russian occupying authorities and people are living in them, the properties will soon be declared ownerless; in effect nationalised, and sold.

Petro Andruishenko, an adviser to the Mariupol municipal authority in exile, says he knows that in his absence his apartment has been broken into and his possessions stolen. Like many of the other roughly 350,000 Mariupolans from a prewar population of 430,000 that have fled the city, he cannot risk going back to occupied Mariupol to re-register his apartment, as required, in person. He expects that soon someone else will be living there. “It’s a normal story,” he says.