By Galina Korol | 2024-06-20

KYIV -- As Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine drags into its third year, Ukrainians are losing houses and other buildings by the thousands.

Between February 2022 and December 2023, "about 210,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed in Ukraine," The New York Times reported June 3.

The Times analyzed European Space Agency satellite images of urban areas with the help of remote sensing scientists to reach that grim number.

"The scale is hard to comprehend," the report said. "More buildings have been destroyed in Ukraine than if every building in Manhattan were to be leveled four times over."

Dozens of cities -- including Bakhmut, Irpin, Kherson, Kyiv, Odesa and many others -- have been flattened or heavily damaged.

Kharkiv "has suffered withering attacks," it added.

Mariupol is the "worst-hit city" in Ukraine, the analysis showed.

Russian occupiers are busy rebuilding the city to hide what they did.

Ukrainians cannot count how many apartment buildings in Mariupol were destroyed but know that "about 25,000 single-family houses" on its outskirts were lost, Oleh Popenko, founder of the Union of Utility Consumers and a housing analyst, told Kontur.

'Nothing to go back to'

"The true scope of destruction is likely to be even greater -- and it keeps growing," the Times reported, adding that the analysis does not include "Crimea or parts of western Ukraine where accurate data [were] unavailable."

The losses are particularly cruel as the Kremlin flouts international law when dropping bombs and launching missiles.

The buildings destroyed include 106 hospitals and clinics, 109 places of worship (including churches, temples, mosques and monasteries), and 708 schools (including kindergartens, colleges and universities), the Times reported.

"These sites are explicitly protected under the Geneva Conventions," it noted.

As of January, Russian damage to Ukrainian infrastructure amounted to almost $155 billion, the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) said in a February report.

Losses include "more than 27,000 apartment buildings," it said.

"For any reconstruction we need billions of dollars and probably decades to rebuild everything," Popenko said.

"Even if the war ends tomorrow, in many places there will be nothing to go back to," the Times wrote.

Who will pay?

The mammoth project of reconstructing Ukraine raises many questions.

"Which cities do we need to rebuild?" Popenko said.

"We need a completely new economic model that must be backed by a new housing policy," he said.

He suggested creating a "buffer zone" by not rebuilding ruined cities within 100km of Russia.

Other important questions to consider are how much money is needed and who will pay.

Post-war reconstruction and recovery in Ukraine are projected to cost $486 billion over the next decade, up from $411 billion estimated a year ago, according to a United Nations-backed study published in February.

"We'll need to rebuild the hospitals, schools from kindergarten on up ... and the infrastructure that is part of a normal life," Ukrainian economist Ivan Us told Kontur.

"It's paramount to send the signal that Russia is the aggressor country and ... needs to be accountable," he said.

The Hague already keeps a Register of Damage for Ukraine, he noted.

It began taking claims in April.

The register is expected to become the biggest database of all damage inflicted in Ukraine since February 24, 2022, and to serve as the basis for reparations.

"A compensation mechanism hasn't been created yet, but the process is under way. And I hope that provisions will ... be made for compensation funds in the future," said Ludmila Simonova, a board member of the International Valuation Standards Council and vice president of the European chapter of the American Society of Appraisers.

Housing vouchers

The Ukrainian government already is using its own register of damaged property to make restitution to Ukrainians who lost their homes to Russian bombing, Simonova told Kontur.

Karyna Omeliachik of Hostomel has firsthand experience with this system.

Three years before the 2022 Russian onslaught, she and her husband purchased a duplex in Hostomel, a Kyiv suburb. After the invasion, they fled to Transcarpathia with their young son.

"We learned in March 2022 that the house had been destroyed down to the foundation," she told Kontur, citing photos that other residents of that area posted online.

Russian soldiers had used the house as a headquarters and set it on fire when they left, she learned.

A Ukrainian government program called eRecovery enabled Omeliachik's family to return.

In January, they applied for a voucher through the mobile app Diia.

They submitted "many documents" and waited.

On March 6, they received "a message congratulating us on getting the voucher," Omeliachik recalled.

"We got about $104,000," she said.

They were permitted only to buy another house with the funds, which they did.

They are back in Hostomel.