How Russia seizes homes in occupied Ukraine | Global News Podcast

Welcome to the global news podcast from the BBC here on YouTube. I'm Valerie Sanderson and with me is Olga Robinson from BBC Verify. And Olga, you've been investigating a story which is all

about tens of thousands of homes in occupied Ukraine being seized by Russia. Tell us what you found. >> So yes, indeed, my team spent the past six months looking into various official documents published by Moscow-installed authorities in

four regions of Ukraine and we found that more than 34,000 homes are currently in the process of being seized by occupied authorities and many of them belong to Ukrainians who have fled the fighting. And it effectively works like this.

Properties are declared ownerless and then they're transferred to the occupation authorities and from there they can be redistributed to somebody else and those people will have to be Russian citizens. And it's not just some local initiative that only exists

in the occupied Ukraine. It has been officially endorsed by Russian President Vladimir Putin because he signed a law in late December last year that formalizes this process across all four occupied Ukrainian >> I know you've been talking to people there.

Tell us some of their stories. >> One of the people we had to change her name, her pseudonym that we're using is Ivanna. She's a young woman from Mariupol and her family fled in the early days of the full-scale invasion, but her

grandparents, as is very, very in Ukraine, they stayed. They decided not to leave. And she told us a quite heartbreaking story. Her father built a house for her mother um, years ago she was just diagnosed with cancer and they were

they were told that it's best to take her out of Mariupol itself and maybe um, some fresh air would help her. So, they built this house just outside of Mariupol. Um, it became their family home.

Unfortunately, the mother passed away soon after they finished um, the construction. And then this year in April officials came, the occupation um, officials came and told the grandparents who still live there that this house has been identified for seizure.

And that's because the owner is the who's fled Ukraine. And the grandparents, even though they do have Russian passports, they do not have ownership rights to this property. And so, they're now facing the possibility of being evicted from this And at the same time, as Ivana put

it it's not the very fact that they're just losing physical property that she finds really disturbing. It's the fact that it's their memories as well. It's all going. It's the place where their mother lived.

It's the place of her childhood memories. Um, and she almost came across as resigned to the idea that it will likely be lost. >> Why are the Russians doing this? >> Well, experts we spoke to say that most likely this

is part of much wider efforts to Russify the area, to kind of the Russian control of it. Um, and they say it's done partly in order to make sure that it's much harder for Ukrainians to reintegrate these regions, should they ever reclaim the territory.

Just making it physically really possible, but also from the legal perspective it sounds like it's a nightmare because there are legal owners in Ukraine, but there are also quasi-legal owners from the Russian perspective, um even though there are question marks from the international law point of view about

the whole scheme. And then, at the same time, uh experts told us that the scheme is meant to also create the impression to the domestic population in Russia that we're here to stay, we're here for good.

Um and we did um ask for comment from the Russian government and they said that the scheme is part of um their legal framework to integrate the reunited regions, as they put it, into the Russian system, but also that the scheme manages properties whose owners cannot be identified