Russia's property seizure wave: thousands of privatised plots taken from ordinary owners

Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russian authorities have dramatically intensified the reversal of 1990s privatisation, not only nationalising businesses and factories, but seizing thousands of private land plots from ordinary citizens. From suburban Moscow to Sochi, Krasnodar and Kamchatka, prosecutors are targeting homes and dachas with demolition orders and confiscation lawsuits, often citing legal violations that date back three decades. Residents who legally purchased land and built homes with mortgages are being told to demolish their properties at their own expense, with no compensation.

Russia is experiencing a sweeping wave of private property seizures that goes far beyond the high-profile nationalisation of major businesses. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Prosecutor General's Office has extended its campaign to ordinary citizens, filing thousands of lawsuits to reclaim land plots that were privatised or sold legally decades ago, leaving families with mortgages, children, and nowhere to go.

Moscow suburbs: homes built legally, then condemned

In Pushkinsky District northeast of Moscow, residents of 13 cottage settlements, including "Sova" and "Vesna-Park", are fighting orders to demolish their homes without compensation. The local administration sold land in the area from 2022 onwards; the first houses appeared in 2023. But residents began receiving lawsuits as soon as they registered their homes in the state cadastre.

Ivan, a resident of Sova, described the absurdity: «Nobody knew anything, everything was clean. We registered the house, and three months later received a letter saying our plot is in a water protection zone. Four months after that came the lawsuit: demolish at your own expense, no compensation, you are an illegal structure.»

Courts ruled that the homes sit within a sanitary protection zone around the Uchinskoye Reservoir, which supplies drinking water to northeast Moscow. Yet the boundaries of that zone are classified as a state secret, according to the Pushkinsky District administration. A lawyer with a security clearance who was hired by the residents was still denied access to the document. An independent environmental assessment found that the settlements posed no threat to the reservoir, but courts disregarded it.

Courts across all 13 settlements ruled against the residents. Many had sold homes in other Russian regions to invest their savings here, leaving them with nowhere to live. Those who took out mortgages still face decades of repayments, for houses they must destroy.

Sochi: 11,000 plots seized, families losing everything

The scale in Sochi is even larger. Since 2021, the Prosecutor General's Office has had 11,000 plots arrested as part of a criminal case involving the alleged illegal transfer of land from the Sochi National Park. Nearly 8,000 of those plots had already been built on.

Irina Sitnikova and her husband bought land in Sochi in 2009 for their son, land within a cooperative that was founded in the late 1950s, nearly 25 years before the national park was created in 1983. Prosecutors nonetheless argued that the land had been illegally removed from the park. «The court lasted 30 minutes, they didn't let me open my mouth,» Sitnikova told journalists.

The family of Vadim and Marina Gubsky, who have three children and were living in a 14-square-metre room, bought land in Sochi in 2021 using a mortgage, hoping to finally build a home after years on a state housing waiting list. They learned about the lawsuit against them only by accident, stumbling upon the court document online. No notification had been sent to them.

The legal logic that strips good-faith buyers of rights

The mechanism prosecutors use is consistent: they identify an alleged violation in the original privatisation chain going back to the 1990s, then argue that all subsequent owners, no matter how carefully they purchased the property, hold invalid title.

Lawyer Svetlana Shirina of the Krasnodar firm Miar Group said the situation has made her work almost impossible: «I want to be confident in my work, I want to protect the buyer. But that has become very difficult.» Even a full ownership history check offers no guarantee, the state can refuse to disclose prior owners' personal data, making a complete chain of title practically impossible to verify.

In Krasnodar's Starokorsunskaya settlement, prosecutors in 2024 demanded the return of plots to the state, arguing that the original owner, David Topolyan, had acquired them illegally. Among the affected buyers were families who had used state maternity capital subsidies and mortgage loans to purchase the land. One family with twelve children had received a state subsidy specifically for the purchase.

Kamchatka: a prosecutor's corridor warning

In Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a man identified only as Bogdan inherited a 840-square-metre warehouse his father had purchased at an official state auction in the 2000s. In late 2024, the property was swept up in a Prosecutor General's lawsuit targeting a former regional official accused of obtaining port land through corruption. The alleged connection? Bogdan's family and the official's companies had used the same accountant to file tax returns.

Bogdan's land and warehouse were seized, and his bank accounts were frozen. He sold his apartment to pay legal fees and moved in with his mother.

Before one hearing, a Moscow prosecutor addressed the waiting defendants in the corridor: «Why are you guys protesting? The Supreme Court is with us anyway.»

A structural assault on property rights

The pattern repeats across Russia: in Crimea's village of Uyutnoye, in Krasnodar's Shepsi and Olginka, in the Leningrad Region near Peterhof, in Karachay-Cherkessia's Arkhyz ski resort. In almost every case, prosecutors cite original privatisation irregularities from decades past to invalidate all subsequent ownership.

Svetlana Shirina put it simply: a six-hundred-square-metre plot with a home and vegetable garden is «a cornerstone that cannot be taken away» in Russian culture. «For those who earned those six hundred square metres with great effort, what is happening is horror and shock.»

Resident Sergei from Vesna-Park, whose father sold a Moscow flat to buy the now-contested land ahead of retirement, expressed what many feel: «Judging by the situation in the country, this can happen to any person at any moment, regardless of when and where the land was bought and the house was built.»

A Krasnodar prosecutor, in an informal conversation overheard by residents, was blunter still about why the seizures are happening: «The land needs to go to SVO participants and large families, and there is no land. So wherever it can be taken, that is what they're doing.»