Cheap Loans Fuel a Construction Push
The building activity is concentrated in occupied areas of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, where developers can secure financing at interest rates as low as 3%. Buyers, meanwhile, are being offered mortgages at an even lower rate of just 2%. Those numbers are far below typical market rates, making the projects highly attractive for companies willing to build in contested territory.

Mariupol at the Center of the Boom
Nowhere is this construction drive more visible than in Mariupol, a city left in ruins after Russia's brutal siege in 2022. According to the investigation, Russian state banks have channelled at least 61.4 billion rubles into new housing developments there alone. Developers stand to pocket more than 18 billion rubles in profit from these projects combined.

Yet for the people who actually lived in the city before the war, the picture looks very different. Many former residents whose buildings were demolished say they have been left without proper replacement housing or fair compensation. A separate investigation uncovered an even bigger pattern behind this: occupation authorities have seized or marked for seizure over 34,000 Ukrainian-owned homes across the occupied regions since 2024, with more than 14,000 of those cases in Mariupol alone.

Russia continues to claim all four regions as its own territory, a move the international community does not recognize. Notably, Moscow still doesn't hold full control over any of the four regions it claims to have annexed.