Moscow's secret plan to repopulate Mariupol with Russians

Officials in Moscow have drawn up a development plan for the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol and it includes a major increase in population which will be driven by migration from Russia according to Ukraine’s National Resistance Center. 

The National Resistance Center was created by Ukraine's Special Operations Forces in order to train, coordinate, and scale the country’s resistance against Russia according to the organization's website. 

Sometimes this means officials from the resistance center are helping partisans behind enemy lines while other times they're assisting those in the occupied territories in gathering information from the enemy. 

This is exactly how the National Resistance Center claims it discovered that the Kremlin developed a development plan for the city of Mariupol, one that would see a major shift in the demographics of the occupied city. 

The National Resistance Center said that Russia was allegedly planning on moving 300,000 new people into Mauripol and wanted the population shift to be completed before the end of 2035—though the plan was already being put into action. 

Russia has been trying to drive migration to Mariupol by offering a number of incentives for those who move to the city, one of which includes preferential mortgages for people who make the move to Mariupol according to the National Resistance Center. 

“The Kremlin started a program of cheap mortgages on properties in occupied parts of Ukraine, such as Donetsk oblast’s Mariupol, to encourage Russians to move there,” The Kyiv Independent’s Dinara Khalilova reported. 

“Moscow purportedly sends work migrants and civil servants from Russia’s ‘depressed’ regions to the occupied territories,” Khalilova added. 

The report also alleged that Russia was also forcibly deporting people from Ukraine and sending them to Russia, which it noted were actions that “correspond to the signs of genocide according to international law” according to a translation from The Telegraph. 

“All those involved in the genocide of the Ukrainian nation will suffer a just and inevitable punishment for this,” the report read according to a translation from Google. 

The British newspaper also noted Mariupol had a prewar population of 450,000 residents but that number dwindled to just 100,000 after the invasion and subsequent destruction of the city by Russian forces in their drive to capture it. 

Roughly 25,000 civilians were killed and 90% of the buildings in the city were destroyed in the fighting, though there are reports that suggest the number of killed is three times as high as what has been officially recorded. 

Upwards of 350,000 citizens were forced to leave Mariupol after the invasion of Ukraine began based on estimates from the United Nations.

On July 27, the former Ukrainian mayor of Mariupol Petro Andryushchenko noted on Telegram that Russian authorities in the city were forcibly evicting all residents who could not prove that they owned their properties. 

The report from the National Resistance Center noted that all those who took part in the genocidal activity would inevitably be punished but the organization stopped short of providing the supporting documents for the claims it was making. 

However, it is important to note that a similar ten-year-plan regarding the redevelopment of Mariupol was leaked in October 2022 and published by the Russian news website The Village according to The Moscow Times. 

The leaked October 2022 plan pegged Mariupol’s population at 212,000 residents but also aimed to see the city return to its prewar population level of 450,000 people before 2035, a goal that would be helped by the building of private homes and apartments.