Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine is an Ultraviolent Settler-Colonial Project*
* Source: Russian state media
In order to understand this story better, you should probably know where I’m coming from. I am a Russian journalist currently living in exile for fear of persecution for my work back home. For the past two years, I’ve dedicated myself to exposing my country’s and its army’s crimes against Ukraine, a country where several branches of my extended family come from. I can’t visit the village where one of my great-grand uncles was born and drafted into the Red Army in July 1941, only to be executed by starvation in a Nazi death camp for Soviet POWs in today’s Poland in September the same year. For one thing, this village has been depopulated since 1986, almost as long as I’ve lived, because it’s part of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The other reason is that I’m Russian, in both ethnic and national sense.
The likes of me aren’t welcome in Ukraine, and probably won’t be for a long time, for obvious reasons. I’ve never actually been to Ukraine save for a regular Moscow to Simferopol train trip I made first with my parents to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic when I was a little boy, and then as a young teenager to the newly independent Crimea with its own currency and language. My last trip was in 1998, my last pre-adult year and also last before Putin’s arrival to the scene. So while I do have quite a few friends, colleagues and acquaintances from Kyiv and other places currently besieged or occupied by Russia, I don’t have any particular insights into Ukrainian domestic politics over the years or the state of its civil society. I’ve covered Ukrainian political affairs only insofar they’ve had impact on Russia’s — like the intimidation exerted on Moscow’s top business school to allow three students, one of which is the daughter of a Ukrainian Putin-friendly oligarch, to continue their studies despite failing grades.
My motivation is simple enough — to me at least. My country has not only violently attacked another, killing untold thousands and condemning millions more to the loss of their homes and livelihoods. It also condemned my generation, and probably more to come, tainting all Russians with complicity in a crime of historical proportions. And while I was powerless to prevent that from happening, I’ll now dedicate my life to exposing at least some aspects of this calamity.
I also think that Ukraine should be able to defend itself by whatever means, which must be provided to it as military aid, immediately and without any resrictions. Ukraine did not ask for this war, whatever Putin and his lickspittles may claim, but it deserves a fair chance to win it.
With this preamble in mind, let’s move on to our matter at hand. The siege of Mariupol in March 2022 was one of Russia’s early victories — soon to be followed by a series of military humiliations and graphic, gruesome evidence of fresh atrocities in places liberated from Russian occupation, like Bucha, Irpin and other areas of northeastern regions bordering Russia.
But Mariupol is also a crime the scale of which we’re yet to fully comprehend. Its mass graves are growing to an extent which is visible on satellite maps, but we’ll never know the full scope of the casualties inflicted on a town with a pre-war population of almost half a million people until the Russian occupation is lifted. Whenever that happens, the world will be shattered by the magnitude of brutality exerted on a single once peaceful urban area. We still only know bits and pieces: the indiscriminate, premeditated attacks on densely populated civilian areas and objects like hospitals; the wholesale destruction of every last vestige of peaceful life and even final dignity for thousands of victims whose relatives and neighbors were forced to bury them in unmarked shallow graves in their bombed out buildings’ courtyards. I covered this phase of Russia’s invasion from afar, so my knowledge of life in Mariupol under Russia’s siege is limited to testimonies of the city’s inhabitants I myself recorded or edited. Some of these images will stay with me forever:
One of my most revealing interviews covering Russia’s war on Ukraine was with Polina Kovalevskaya. Along with her parents and two sisters, she was a refugee from Mariupol, the Ukrainian city with a prewar population of almost 450,000 that was besieged by Russian forces for almost three months. After three horrific weeks of hiding in basements during incessant Russian shelling, the family managed to escape the city, which was already a mass grave and charred ruin by then. When I asked them for a photo of their former home, they sent me a video instead. In the clip, amid a vast expanse of smoldering rubble, a Russian tank fires point-blank at an apartment building that was somehow still standing. Part of the building implodes, adding to the total devastation for miles and miles around. “This was our home,” Kovalevskaya told me when describing the video.
But Mariupol’s trials have not ended there. It has been under the Russian occupation for more than two years now — with all the forced Russification and violent suppression of any dissent by the Russia’s security services that followed. No independent Russian reporter can possibly hope to gain access without risking capture and disappearance by one of the many armed groups fighting amongst themselves for control of once a rapidly developing seaside city and now a monumental, sprawling, charred ruin.
Meanwhile, Russia’s propaganda machinery works hard to create an alternative narrative where all blame is shifted onto the Ukrainians supposedly causing all this damage by resisting the Russian “liberation” and defending their city. It’s literally illegal under Russia’s new wartime censorship laws to claim otherwise. But unless you have been following very closely the Russian full-scale invasion in Ukraine from its day one like I have, due to the nature of my job, you probably don’t know that most of Russia’s claims, copy-pasted verbatim by its foreign useful idiots and outright agents of influence, originate from a single source.
That source is Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, which in March 2022 supplied Russian state-owned and loyalist media with “interviews” of refugees from Mariupol who have been forced to flee to Russia proper or its occupied territories of Ukraine. We know this from an email leak exposing the internal communications of Russia’s prime state-owned national broadcaster, VGTRK. These files are available online, I and my colleagues from various Russian and international media outlets have covered them extensively and confirmed their authenticity.
Already traumatized by the destruction of their entire livelihoods, many people in Mariupol were subjected to an even more devilishly cruel and heartless treatment at the hands of the FSB. They were forced — whether in a “filtration” camp on Russia’s border or in a windowless room somewhere — to read on camera a scripted “eyewitness testimony” of how Mariupol’s Ukrainian defenders were actually responsible for all the atrocities, the same Russia has been blamed for. And then they were forced to re-read it again, and again if they slipped, until they produced a result satisfiable to a FSB officer. This footage was then emailed to government relations representatives in most national news outlets under full Kremlin’s control. The fate of many of these people is still unknown, but false “testimonies” extracted from them form the basis of Russia’s continued grotesque lies today. It boils my blood to see them shamelessly promoted by the various arms and representatives of the Russian government — and uncritically repeated by their Western agents.
So we still don’t know and can’t know for now nor the true scale of destruction and industrial murder, or what is really happening in this blackened shell of a city under Russia’s secret, malevolent pall, away from the fading interest of the world’s general public, distracted by new plagues and wars. However, here is a point I already made back then. I am convinced it still stands, which I’ll demonstrate further, after another paragraph of my article in the Foreign Policy magazine I quoted earlier:
What makes the video so chilling wasn’t just the fact that targeting civilians is a war crime. It’s that the clip bears the unmistakable logo of RT, the Russian channel that started off in 2005 as a mostly benign attempt to improve Russia’s international image and ended up as a domestic disinformation bullhorn. The video’s unequivocal message: This is what we’re doing in Ukraine, and we’re not even going to pretend anything else.
In order to understand this seemingly self-contradictory policy of both denying and celebrating your own crimes, you have to understand that its end goal is not to convince you of one particular view (although, as a byproduct, some foreigners, whether explicitly hired by Russia to do so or out of myopic fixation on the shortcomings of U.S. foreign policy, may adopt it), but to leave you altogether disoriented and mistrustful of any source of information. In this kaleidoskopic room of smoke and mirrors is where the Kremlin’s deceptions thrive on a murky ground, relativizing any real pain and suffering for momentary political gain and breeding nihilism, its only successful export product.
However, the same policy sometimes produces astonishingly self-incriminating pieces of content. Below I will describe one of them in detail, so people who don’t have a habit of closely following Russian government-owned and loyalist media can see with their own eyes what kind of “peace” Russia brought to occupied Ukraine.
Its title is already quite revelatory: “Shock[ing] Apartment Prices in Mariupol. Mortgages, New Development Projects and Reconstruction” (Шок-цены на квартиры в Мариуполе. Ипотека, новостройки и восстановление) This is documentary was released in November 2023, a good year and a few months since the siege and Russian occupation.
Now, the most notable thing about this half an hour long piece of news footage is its author. Regina Orekhova is a distinguished member of Russia’s state propaganda apparatus. She is the recipient of the 2022 Golden Quill of Russia award, today reserved only for the most loyal of the Kremlin’s stenographers; the other recipient that year was Rostislav Zhuravlyov, a National Bolshevik activist who took part as a combatant in the early, then less openly admitted part of Russia’s invasion. Zhuravlyov quite openly admitted he wasn’t really interested in pretending he was an actual journalist, until he was killed in action in Ukraine while wearing military fatigues without any PRESS markings.
Orekhova runs her personal reporting project titled The Civilians (Мирные) from Mariupol under the aegis of RIA Novosti, the zombie brand of a news agency where I worked a decade ago. It has been since absorbed into a massive state-run propaganda conglomerate headed, at least formally, by Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief (by Putin’s personal appointment) of both the RT channel and “Rossiya Segodnya,” which includes both the remnants of RIA Novosti and Sputnik radio stations and websites promoting the Kremlin’s point of view in multiple languages.
This is what makes Regina Orekhova’s documentary on the Mariupol real estate market so revealing. Exiled independent media like Meduza can’t dream about the kind of access she and her crew has; given the lengths the Russian government is prepared to go to pursue its public critics far outside its own borders, it’s not unreasonable for people like me to treat the prospect of being physically back in Russia right now as a major risk. Her reporting cannot be dismissed by Russian state propaganda and its allies as anti-Russian libel by foreign actors; Orekhova is that propaganda.
Now, I contacted Regina Orekhova and volunteered to have her documentary translated into English so that she could upload subtitles to her project’s YouTube. She refused, but automatic translation works relatively well. Please watch it in full, but if you’re struggling to understand some things, I’ll walk you through a few snapshots and provide context.
Orekhova sets the scene by walking past a ruined building and pondering a business scheme: would investing in a razrushka in order to flip it after the reconstruction pay off?
I want you to pause here and appreciate this moment. Razrushka is a Russian word that’s hard to translate into any other language. -ushk- is a suffix that lends diminutive, endearing properties to a word (eg ded vs dedushka, grandfather versus gramps). A bit counterintuitively, it also appears in terms used by real estate agents and urban explorers to describe undesirable properties, such as zabroshka, a verbal noun derived from забросить/забрасывать, to abandon. Now, a razrushka is zabroshka’s cousin, only the root verb in this case is разрушать/разрушить, to destroy.
Yes, you got that absolutely right. Regina Orekhova, a reporter with Russia’s flagship state-owned news agency, is peddling Mariupol’s housing stock, damaged or altogether destroyed by the Russian army which besieged the city and subjected it to indiscriminate shelling and bombing, as a worthwhile investment for her Russian audience. She is being one hundred percent earnest in this segment. She’s not saying these things as an overstatement intended to shock, as you’ll clearly see from the rest of the documentary.
And there’s not going to be a shortage of such prime properties. Orekhova’s cameraman isn’t trying particularly hard to avoid all the carnage around the presenter, simply because there’s so much of it. There’s not a single frame in the entire documentary which doesn’t show charred skeletons of Soviet prefab housing blocks, gutted facades of grand pre-WW2 buildings and broken shop fronts — and that more than a year after the storming of the city by Russian forces in the spring of 2022. The documentary was evidently filmed in the summer of 2023, and there are signs of some new construction work and buildings in scaffolding, but we’ll get to those later.
Orekhova herself is apparently conflicted about being shown around a prime downtown property (price: 5 million rubles, or slightly above $50,000; less expensive than Moscow but definitely above most other Russian regions) which mostly consists of rubble and caved-in ceilings. But the Mariupol real estate agent she is interviewing will have none of it. It will be a priceless investment if you ignore the building’s past and focus on the future, she says.
One notable thing about both Orekhova and her interviewees is how carefully they avoid referring to Mariupol’s destruction — laid bare in front of them — at the hands of the Russian army as anything but “the aforementioned events” or “military actions,” and God forbid you mention Russia’s involvement in these “events.” The real estate woman says this as the camera zooms in on piles of dust-covered toys and random personal effects. This is the “past”: the apartment owners’ belongings which they left behind as they did have to flee “in a great hurry.” Just that we’re 100% clear on this: yes, they are selling an apartment in a building severely damaged by the Russian army, abandoned by its owners — who managed to flee the besieged city and are now refugees — with all their earthly possessions still inside. It’s up to the buyer to clear the garbage out, the real estate confirms to Orekhova, who looks genuinely shocked.
But it’s not like every single person in Mariupol managed to flee the city during the Russian army’s siege or died in it, right? Surely, Russia is not treating the survivors as some kind of unwanted deadwood and is at least rebuilding what it has destroyed and giving these poor people, whom it considers its legal subjects, a new home? Right? Russian propaganda, its Twitter bots and human representatives, claim Russia is “rebuilding” Mariupol, always skirting the issue of why Mariupol would need to be rebuilt in the first place (or, alternatively, squarely blaming all the carnage on the city’s Ukrainian defenders). They usually attach photographs of some nice new buildings, but notice how there are never any actual people around in these pictures, living in those buildings? Not one year ago, not now?
Look at this shiny new apartment block! Surely, it’s a nice replacement for some Mariupol resident whose home on the same spot was pulverized by Russian shells and bombs? Yeah, right. Let’s give the floor to Regina Orekhova and people whose job is to sell apartments in these buildings. The real estate lady tells it like it is: all those new construction projects are built for profit. There is supposed to be a subsidized mortgage scheme for people in the “new regions” (official Russian code for occupied Ukrainian territories), but it’s largely unavailable to the locals since it’s still pegged to one’s salary. It becomes clear in the later segments of Orekhova’s documentary that pretty much the only source of income available to the survivors of the siege of Mariupol — once Ukraine’s industrial powerhouse now lying in utter devastation — is odd rubble clearing jobs, or, at best, minimum wage employment not eligible even for preferential mortgage.
I hope you are keeping track because it’s only going to get worse from here. If locals can’t afford these apartments in buildings constructed from scratch on top of what once was their Khrushchev-era block, who can? That’s right, Russians eager to get in on a lucrative property scheme.
Seaside towns are pretty scarce in Russia. Its Black Sea coast is meagre even with the semi-annexed Abkhazia and completely built up, and Crimea’s majestic southern tip has already been divided up between state villas, security and military installations, as well as other similar places where a regular passer-by is not really welcome (this article in Russian, written by a Crimean journalist, will give you an idea of how things were in 2019 if you Google Translate it). Mariupol is a prime chance to invest in a seafront condo apartment which is a much sought-after luxury in the mostly northern continental Russia.
Clearly, the thought of buying an apartment of someone who died a violent death in it, along with tens of thousands of others whose bones are now forever entombed under the hastily put together new tower blocks, does not deter either the real estate agents nor their (mostly Russian) clients. Because Mariupol apartments are selling like hot cakes! Just look at the classifieds on Avito, Russia’s prime online marketplace. 5 million rubles for a 2-bedroom room apartment is definitely less than Sochi, where one of Putin’s residences is located, but that’s only because it needs “a bit of work” (it imploded on shell impact, burying its former owners and all their worldly possessions inside). Or its former owners are watching helplessly from afar as the occupation authorities commandeer their former home to a “comprehensive inventory”. Meaning, unless they present proof of ownership within 30 days, in person (consider the risks here), their property is escheated and re-sold for profit.
But wait, maybe it’s just one local real estate agent’s opinion and things aren’t that bad really? Well, here’s another segment right after this one. And another Mariupol estate agent says on the record, in no uncertain terms: we locals can’t afford these apartments, it’s just Russians from Russia buying them.
Wow. But maybe things were really that bad last year, when Regina Orekhova was shooting her documentary, but now it’s getting better? Here’s a snippet from another investigation about Mariupol’s housing stock by Russian independent reporters:
Here’s another one, also following up on the next point made by the real estate agent in Orekhova’s documentary: the occupation authorities demolish damaged residential buildings and build new ones on the same spot. However, when Mariupol locals apply for a replacement apartment in the new building, they are told that this is an entirely new structure with a different address, so they have no grounds to claim compensation. Remember, Russia claims to have “liberated” these people from an oppressive “Kiev Nazi junta.”
Actually, if you don’t have the time for the entire doc, just watch the segment with the real estate agent from the screencap above, keeping in mind that this woman is speaking on the record to basically a Russian government representative.
In the next segment, Orekhova follows the first agent through dense overgrowth and piles of rubble. It used to be someone’s home, but now the plot is on the market as prime property within a few minutes’ walk from the beach. At 3 million rubles it’s well above the means of a typical Mariupol survivor. There’s a bit of a catch, though:
“They said?!” The agent’s half-hearted assurances clearly didn’t put Orekhova’s mind to ease.
In the next segment, the agent walks Orekhova through another excellent investment opportunity: buy someone’s former home in a damaged but more or less structurally intact apartment block and flip it after reconstruction. The “before” price for a 3-bedroom apartment is 4 million rubles (the agent’s commission is 6 per cent). If you’re a Mariupol resident lucky enough to be employed, you’re paid something like 20 to 22 thousand rubles a month, according to the locals.
That’s 100 months of working non-stop and saving without spending a kopeck on anything else to be able to afford this lovely “grandma style” apartment — because below subsistence wages obviously make you ineligible even for the most discounted mortgage.
And if you, a Mariupol native, are lucky enough to be alive in a damaged but still standing residential tower, it might even be repaired by your Russian “liberators”, free of charge to you. Obviously, it’s going to be a shady Russian company racking in billions of rubles in state subsidies for “reconstruction of Ukraine” and you’ll end up in a barely inhabitable deathtrap with leaky ceilings and exposed wiring, but what are going to do, send endless petitions, complaints and pleas for mercy to Putin’s office? LOL.
I could go on, but I’m sure my point should be clear enough by now. But just so we’re on the same page about this: Russia invaded Ukraine and reduced one of its largest cities to ruins, killing tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of its residents in the process, while claiming to “liberate” it from people it calls “Nazis.” Then, it illegally annexed the land, robbed the few remaining survivors of ruins of their former homes and is now selling them for a massive profit to Russians from mainland Russia. Remember this when some clueless Western do-gooder claims Ukraine should stop resisting and just surrender to prevent further bloodshed. This is what “peace” on Russia’s terms looks like. And this:
And this (watch with English subs):
