A Longing To Return
Russian officials hoped to bring the occupied city, which had a prewar population of nearly 426,000, back to life, and entice some of the hundreds of thousands who fled to return, particularly those who had fled the city for Russia.
The Russian effort to rebuild Mariupol includes demolition of the tens of thousands of standalone houses and apartment blocks that were destroyed in the fighting.
One of the sites for new high-rise apartment blocks is located in a southwestern district of the city; an organization called the Pobeda Foundation, whose funding sources are opaque, was tasked with running the project. In another location, a series of five-story apartment blocks has popped up at a furious pace. The general contractor for that particular development, which reportedly went up in just 80 days, is a Russian Defense Ministry-owned company.
"The quality is bad, that's for sure," said Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian mayor of Mariupol, now living elsewhere in Ukraine.
"At best, it's like the Soviet concrete high-rise buildings, more or less," he told the News of Azov, a regional project of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service. "And what they're building now has no relation whatsoever with what they have dismantled and demolished."
Hanna Romanenko, the editor in chief of 0629, a Mariupol news website, agrees, alleging that the high-rise foundations being poured by construction workers are substandard. "They're using ordinary concrete for the foundations, which, without shrinkage, will just crumble after two or three years," she said.
Larisa says she and her husband fled Mariupol for Russia in the spring of 2022, but then returned to take care of their aging parents. She says that by her count new building projects numbered only around seven.
She says the process of former residents applying to get new apartment was convoluted, but that retirees were being given priority.
"Not many people are getting new housing: either they don't have enough of the right documents, or they don't like the new place" or the new units are too small, she said.
Tamara and her family returned not long ago from Russia's St. Petersburg region, where they were temporarily housed. Their current housing in Mariupol still has damage from shelling, and temporary workers are rebuilding the structure while some of the units are still occupied.
She says she was glad to be back; the air quality is better since all of the city's heavy industry has been destroyed. "The climate has gotten better because the factories are no longer working," she said.
But, she added, "My husband was just barely able to get a job, and now he's afraid that they might cheat him out of his salary."
Sewage pumping is still a major problem that the Russian administration hasn't repaired, Andryushchenko says.
"The sewage system doesn't work and everything just goes into the sea, further clogging the sewage system. What can be built if you add new houses to the nonworking sewer system without rebuilding the sewer system?" he said.
One St. Petersburg woman who recently returned from delivering medication and other humanitarian aid to Mariupol says she saw lots of construction workers.
"I had the feeling there are more builders than locals," the woman, Svitlana, said. "It seemed to me that they were more actively restoring dilapidated housing, rather than building new ones."
But the city, she adds, is still a largely demolished wasteland. Some residents told her that buildings were being torn down even though human corpses remained inside.
"Windows are being installed in the burnt-out eye sockets of the apartment buildings, even before plumbing and electricity is being restored and the charred walls are cleaned off," she said. "There's a burnt smell everywhere."