By Galina Korol | 2026-01-22

Families who never recovered the bodies of relatives killed in Mariupol are losing their last chance. In the fourth year of the city's occupation, Russian authorities have resumed mass exhumations -- not to identify victims or investigate deaths, but to free land for new construction, according to a January report by the human rights group ZMINA.

Observers describe the practice as systemic. Remains are removed as part of what occupation authorities call "mortgage-based development," clearing sites for new housing projects. During the spring of 2022, amid constant shelling, residents buried the dead wherever possible -- in courtyards, vacant lots, private gardens and on the city's outskirts.

Petro Andryushchenko, a former adviser to Mariupol's mayor and head of the Center for the Study of Occupation, told Kontur that the builders began entering private residential areas and preparing sites, looking for potential locations for construction.

"As a result, they returned to areas where large numbers of people had been buried -- or not buried at all and left where they lay," he said.

Any semblance of burial records has collapsed, Andryushchenko explained. Registration numbers are duplicated, name plates confused, and it is no longer possible to verify who is buried where. Occupation authorities do not attempt to identify remains and bury bodies in bags rather than coffins.

"In fact, they're simply thrown into a ditch, which gets filled in and that's it,” he said.

For families searching for missing relatives, the exhumations mean the erasure of evidence -- and of graves themselves. If the occupation drags on, mass burial sites will simply vanish.

"If the occupation continues for ten years, there will be almost no Mariupol residents left in Mariupol who have relatives buried there. No one will take care of these cemeteries. They will be forgotten. They will simply disappear," Andryushchenko said.

Theater and concealment

The first large-scale exhumations began at the Mariupol Drama Theater in the summer of 2022, when rubble was cleared after the bombing. Bodies were removed in secret on tractor trailers. Some were taken to Manhush, about 15 to 20 kilometers (9 to 12 miles) from the city.

No one knows how many people died in the attack. Andryushchenko said no lists, DNA samples or formal records were ever kept. From the beginning, occupation authorities sought to conceal the scale of the deaths and promote an alternative version of events -- that the building exploded from within.

Residents were recruited to clear debris in exchange for food in a city without water or functioning infrastructure. Most could not endure the work for more than a day or two.

"You have to imagine what condition the bodies were in... Summer, heat, the smell of putrefaction," Andryushchenko said.

Buildings were flooded with liquid chlorine for weeks, he said, but "The putrid odor is not etched out." It seeped into the concrete and foundation -- the same foundation on which a new theater was later built and ceremonially opened in late 2025.

In December, so-called DPR Ombudsman Darya Morozova told TASS that the restored theater was for her "a symbol of Russian strength, which lies in the truth."

She said, "despite a massive campaign of lies and a bloody terrorist attack, Russia has proven its innocence and revived the temple of art."

Those claims sharply contradict extensive evidence about March 16, 2022. Witnesses, independent investigations and Ukrainian authorities say Russian aircraft bombed the theater while civilians, including children, sheltered inside. The precise death toll remains unknown but is believed to be several hundred. Eyewitness accounts and journalistic investigations refute assertions of an internal explosion.

Witnesses remember dead

Twelve-year-old Sasha Kuznetsov spent two weeks sheltering in the theater. He survived the bombing but lost his mother. In a 2022 interview with ASTRA, he recalled how the ceiling collapsed into the auditorium, killing those below. People seated higher survived.

After escaping the ruins, he saw the stage destroyed and the sky above the building. Unable to exit through a collapsed wall, he went through the main entrance and saw rubble and blood.

"Mom, where are you?" he shouted.

A doctor who got acquainted with his mother at the theater took Sasha out of Mariupol through checkpoints to Berdyansk, then Zaporizhzhia and Lviv. He had no surviving close relatives.

For longtime resident Evgeny Sosnovsky, footage of festive dances at the rebuilt theater represents not renewal but cruelty.

"Building a theater on a site where so many people died is a cynical act. There should be a memorial on this site. And not only in memory of those who died in the Drama Theater, but in memory of all who have died in Mariupol," he told Kontur.

During the most intense months of fighting, about 1,000 people died each day, Sosnovsky said citing figures from Ukrainian authorities.

In the spring of 2022, Mariupol had no system to evacuate the wounded, clear rubble or collect bodies. Those trapped under debris had no hope of rescue.

"If someone remained under the rubble, he couldn't expect help from anywhere. Even if he was alive, he would die from wounds, cold or hunger," Sosnovsky said.

Bodies lay in the streets for weeks. Some were wrapped in sheets and left by roadsides. Sosnovsky saw militants from the so-called DPR load corpses into dump trucks.

"I saw an orange dump truck half filled with bodies. They were just thrown in. A mountain of bodies," he said.

At one point, a father and son from the apartment building where the Sosnovskys were sheltering were among the dead. A Russian sniper shot them at the building's entrance, where their bodies lay for about a week.

The tragedy also directly affected Sosnovsky's family, as the shelling killed his brother-in-law.

"A shell hit my wife's brothers house. He held the door so it wouldn't be blown in. He was buried in the collapse, his leg crushed, with severe bleeding," the Mariupol resident said.

The family managed to bury him only eight days later, in a garden near the house, during a brief lull between bombings.

"At the beginning of March, the ground was still frozen. It was cold. The hole wasn't very deep -- we did what we could," Sosnovsky said.

After 65 days in a living hell, Sosnovsky escaped with his wife and elderly mother to Ukrainian-controlled territory. Now, when he opens Google Maps on his phone and looks up the address where his home once stood, he sees a concrete parking lot.

"I look at some of the photos that catch my eye from time to time, and I see that this is no longer the same Mariupol. Along with the people, they killed the soul of this city," he said.