By Galina Korol | 2026-05-28

The bodies were still in the rubble when Russian occupation forces brought in the bulldozers. By the time a crushing plant arrived in 2023, Mariupol's destroyed apartment buildings had become raw material. The ruins were processed, loaded, and hauled away -- 100,000 tons of concrete turned into road fill.

The dead went with them.

Bones in the roadbed

Petro Andriushchenko, head of the Center for Occupation Studies (COS), told Kontur that occupation authorities established a dedicated construction debris landfill in 2022 to handle the demolition campaign. Mounds of concrete, rebar, timber and building fragments rose on the city's outskirts, some as tall as a nine-story building. The crushing plant that followed converted that debris into crushed stone, which became the foundation for new Russian infrastructure in the occupied territory. A portion was sold to developers from Russia's Rostov region.

Workers demolished some buildings without conducting exhumations first, Andriushchenko said. The rubble almost certainly contained human remains that were never identified. Now that the concrete has been processed and the gravel hauled away, establishing an accurate death toll or conducting DNA testing has become far harder.

"We are not guessing -- we know that human remains could still have been trapped in that construction debris," he said.

He draws a sharp distinction: this is not about covering up war crimes. The cover-up happened earlier, when buildings came down without exhumations. What followed was something else -- indifference, made permanent.

"This is about their attitude. It's about how little they care. It's the exact same mentality as rebuilding the drama theater: they built it on top of a grave, and their response is, 'Well, so what?'"

Records that may not survive

Andrii Marusov -- a journalist, local historian, and former board chairman of Transparency International Ukraine (TIU) from Mariupol -- escaped the siege in 2022.

"There were several graves in my courtyard -- I could see them right from my own windows," he told Kontur.

Courtyard burials spread across the city. Occupation forces later exhumed those bodies and transported them to the Staryi Krym cemetery, a process captured by satellite imagery. But Russian forces destroyed at least one secondary reburial site in Manhush, leveling it without a trace.

"There used to be stakes with numbers on them. They leveled the whole thing, as if no graves had ever existed there," Marusov said.

Four years on, thousands of families still do not know what happened to their relatives -- whether they died under rubble, were killed, or were deported after filtration.

Occupation forces did document the reburials, recording where bodies were found and where they were taken. Temporary courtyard graves often bore names and dates. But those records are held by the occupation administration, and Mariupol residents' efforts to force their publication have produced nothing. Marusov sees their destruction as a near-certainty.

"Most likely, if a real threat emerges and they have to flee the city, they will simply burn it all," he said.

A desert with roads

While Russia erases the evidence, its state media promotes a narrative of rebirth. Marusov calls it a Potemkin village. The facades may look repaired; the interiors are not.

The Levoberezhny (Left Bank) district surrounding the Azovstal plant is disappearing. Occupation forces are not rebuilding the demolished neighborhoods -- they are leaving them as vacant lots.

"Half the city will simply cease to exist. A desert will remain — just roads, and that's it," Marusov said.

Russian citizens account for 75% of buyers in newly constructed mortgaged buildings. Residents from other occupied territories make up the remaining 25%. Pre-war Mariupol residents are effectively absent from the buyer pool.

The financial picture matches the physical one. Budget data for 2026–2027 obtained by COS shows Mariupol's deficit nearly doubled in months, rising from 375 million RUB (approximately $4.2 million) to 655 million RUB (approximately $7.3 million). The city generates about 1.7 billion RUB (approximately $19 million) in internal revenue against expenditures exceeding 7.4 billion RUB (approximately $83 million) -- covering roughly one-fifth of its own costs. The rest comes from direct Moscow subsidies.

Before the war, Mariupol was a regional medical hub. That infrastructure is gone. Patients requiring complex surgery must travel to Donetsk, close to active front lines, or to Russian cities. A doctor shortage has pushed the occupation administration to rotate physicians in from Russia on short-term contracts, a system that is already failing. One family, Marusov said, had to take a child with acute inflammation to a regional center outside Mariupol because no pediatrician was available in the city itself.

"I would never have believed this before, but that is exactly how things happened and continue to happen," he said.

The only thing that has not been demolished is the hope of returning. Though even that is eroding.

"The more time passes, the fewer reasons we have to hope, and less faith remains."