“I am your neighbor, Volodya. Your flats have been bought. Name me — it is pressing.”
When that message reached Svitlana Kolisnichenko and her household in Might 2024, it confirmed their worst fears in regards to the property they left behind in Crimea after shifting to Kyiv.
Because the preliminary unlawful Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014 — and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — a whole bunch of buildings, properties, and different properties in Crimea have been seized by Russian authorities, in accordance with worldwide rights observers.
In Kolisnichenko’s case, they realized {that a} former Ukrainian soldier who was now a Russian citizen was residing of their three-room house with out their consent. He was additionally registering his youngsters and spouse as residents there.
The brand new tenant was actually not paying the Kolisnichenkos’ hire.
“I feel our neighbor, Lyudmila, and her husband, Vitaliy, gave him the keys,” Kolisnichenko mentioned. “She will need to have began renting out our house or one thing.”
She says she solely discovered about this when Volodya known as her to inform her that Lyudmila “was letting strangers into the house, together with navy males.”
“In my constructing, the place we used to stay, there are already seven such flats. It seems that is one thing of a mass phenomenon,” Kolisnichenko mentioned.
In keeping with rights organizations, the seizure of properties belonging to Ukrainians who oppose Russian occupation has been systematic and on a mass scale.
These like Kolisnichenko who refused the supply of Russian passports have been a frequent goal, it appears.
“We had been in opposition to Russia’s insurance policies — that is why we did not take a passport, that is the one cause,” Kolisnihenko mentioned. “I had the complete proper to get a passport and my mom is in Russia, however I did not wish to. I did not like this aggression.”
The coverage has value a whole bunch of Ukrainians their properties and buildings, say observers.
“If [countries] deal with Russian aggression unfavorably and impose sanctions, then [its] residents can be thought of unfriendly,” mentioned Mykyta Petrovets of the nonprofit Regional Middle for Human Rights. In instances like this, below Russian legislation, “the corresponding confiscation of property can happen.”
Many Ukrainian property homeowners got a couple of yr both to switch or promote their properties, Petrovets mentioned, after which “compelled gross sales by court docket orders started. Now such plots are being bought at auctions. From this attitude, their property is successfully being expropriated as effectively.”
Yulia Stezhko, whose household invested in a plot of land in Crimea and deliberate a home there, found it had been seized by a court docket decree after they left the peninsula.
The land, which she described as being “with a view of the ocean, typically a pleasant property,” is a big loss.
“We purchased it with the financial savings of the entire household,” she says, including they’d hoped their youngsters’s holidays could be spent there in accordance with household custom. “Apart from, my maternal grandfather is buried there.”
When she inquired with the authorities in Crimea, Stezhko was informed “{that a} decree had come into impact, in accordance with which I had no rights to the property, and that is it.”
In 2023, the Russian-installed authorities in Crimea introduced their intention to promote round 1,000 properties, together with the house in Yalta belonging to Olena Zelenska, the spouse of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which was bought for 44 million rubles ($530,000).
By the top of 2023, greater than 2,600 belongings belonging to Ukrainians had been illegally appropriated, an investigation by RFE/RL’s Crimea.Realities has proven.
Russia No Longer Sure By ECHR
In March 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree saying practically all of Crimea a so-called border territory of Russia. That act prohibited “international residents,” together with Ukrainians, from proudly owning land in occupied Crimea.
Beneath Ukrainian legislation, nothing has modified; the property possession of Ukrainians remains to be totally acknowledged. However Russian-installed officers in Crimea have revealed lengthy lists of addresses and titles of plots of land they plan to grab.
The Regional Middle for Human Rights has documented that, in simply three years, the variety of plots owned by so-called international residents in Crimea has decreased by 50 p.c — from over 11,000 to five,000.
The European Court docket of Human Rights (ECHR) has sued over the land seizures and declared the Russian coverage unlawful. However in 2022, Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe and is now not a celebration to the European Conference on Human Rights, that means its authorities is now not legally sure by the court docket’s rulings.
The Russian authorities have since declared that choices by the ECHR won’t be enforced.
Some 1,101 lawsuits filed by Ukrainians with the ECHR over human rights violations in occupied Crimea stay on document, greater than half over the expropriation of property.
