By Galina Korol | 2025-12-02

Mariupol has been under Russian occupation since May 2022, but the city's most visible growth isn't housing or industry -- it's cemeteries. From space, the outlines of new neighborhoods are missing; instead, satellites capture the steady advance of burial rows carved into the soil. What was once a thriving port is now a place where death outpaced recovery, and where, according to observers, the monthly toll rose higher than during the worst waves of COVID-19.

The city that Russian forces destroyed and later vowed to rebuild continued to lose residents at a staggering pace. The Center for the Study of Occupation estimated roughly 20 deaths a day, or more than 600 a month.

In an October 6 video on the Center's Telegram channel, local blogger Vanya "The Brow-Bearer" Chushikin said he was struggling to arrange his aunt's burial.

"There's a long line now. Every day, apparently, twenty people die and that's why you have to wait in line," he said.

Satellite imagery reinforced those accounts, according to Petro Andryushchenko, head of the Center for the Study of Occupation and a former adviser to Mariupol's mayor.

"We're recording a simply crazy increase in burials, despite the fact that there is no combat," he told Kontur.

He added that official cemeteries told only part of the story. Long-closed graveyards have also been used again.

"There are inactive and long-closed cemeteries where burials are also taking place… They are growing," he said.

The population drop made the figures even more striking. Before the war, about 500,000 people lived in the city. Ukrainian Deputy Mayor Denis Kochubey said there were "clearly less than 300,000" residents left. He told Priazovye News in October that during the worst COVID-19 period, "we were recording up to 150 extra deaths per month," far fewer than now.

Andryushchenko said many of the dead were elderly people living with chronic illness and little medical support.

"In Mariupol, medical positions are staffed at no more than 35%... What remains are the worst of the worst [doctors]," he said. The result was predictable: "People simply do not get the care they should get… They got unprofessional help and died."

A city only on paper

While graveyards expanded, the occupation administration described a thriving future. A document titled "Forecast of the Socioeconomic Development of the Urban District of Mariupol… for 2026–2028," published November 7, projected population growth, rising business activity and new housing.

Journalist Alena Kalyakina of 0629.com.ua reviewed the document and told Kontur its vision bore little resemblance to life in the city. The forecast predicted a population of 360,000 by 2026 and 400,000 by 2028. Yet elsewhere, the same document conceded "unsatisfactory indicators" and continued natural decline due to high mortality and low birthrates.

Kalyakina said it was unrealistic to reach the projected population levels, even with an influx of new Russian arrivals.

"There are almost no young people in the city… They try to leave because there is no work, no prospects," she said.

Those who stayed were often too old, sick or impoverished to leave. She described today's Mariupol as a place rebuilt not for its residents but for Russian buyers and propaganda.

"The occupiers are interested in areas on the coast... They demolish destroyed residential buildings in these places and build new ones, but this now involves a mortgage," Kalyakina said.

The loans required three years of stable employment and formal income -- conditions almost no locals could meet. Most buyers were Russians. Residents, meanwhile, were offered "abandoned housing" -- apartments taken from the dead or those who fled.

"It's the housing that [the occupation authorities], one might say, took away from city residents," Kalyakina said.

She recalled the case of an 86-year-old woman whose home was destroyed and who received no replacement.

"She's on a waiting list... but she was offered 'abandoned housing'. She cried and protested, and they told her: 'If you don't want it, then you'll get nothing,'" Kalyakina said.

Industry in ruins

Before 2022, Mariupol was a major industrial center, home to Azovstal, the Illich Iron and Steel Works, Azovmash and Azovelektrostal. All were devastated during the invasion.

"The city was destroyed, and the factories too. Azovstal -- completely destroyed. Illich — partially," Kalyakina said. Claims of restoring these sites, she added, were implausible: metallurgy requires heavy energy capacity and massive investment, neither of which the occupation provided.

Instead, plants were being dismantled.

"The plant is basically just being cut up for scrap metal… a Chechen group is doing this," she explained.

Attempts to turn parts of the Illich works into military repair shops were mostly for show.

"Before the war, 10,000 people worked [there]. Now 580 people work in these workshops," Kalyakina said, citing occupation data.

Azovmash faced the same fate: publicized "restoration" videos contrasted sharply with a facility largely reduced to scrap operations.

"What's happening in Mariupol is the complete opposite of what the occupiers are describing," Kalyakina said. If the occupation continued, she warned, the remaining residents could disappear -- replaced by colonizers brought from Russia.