Yandex removes demolished destroyed houses in Mariupol from its maps. Ombudsman of Ukraine Dmitry Lubinets drew attention to this.
As an example, he cites house 33 on Azovstalskaya Street. It was destroyed by the Russian military, and after the capture of the city, it was demolished. The building still remains on Google Maps, but has disappeared from Yandex Maps. “Mariupol is a city where the Russian Federation has violated all norms of humanitarian law. And even erasing houses from the maps will not help the guilty to escape punishment for what they have done!” writes Lubinets.
According to the Ukrainian Ombudsman, the Russian authorities plan to demolish about a thousand more houses that they could not destroy to the ground during the siege of the city. They also demolish houses in the historical part of the city to hide the consequences of their bombardments. As Lubinets writes, in doing so, Russia turns “the history of Mariupol during the Second World War into uselessness, which will later be thrown away.”
In mid-October, the occupying authorities of Mariupol demolished the memorial to the Victims of the Holodomor, which had been installed in the center of the city 18 years ago. “It was not Ukraine or Donbass that suffered the most from the famine of 1932–33; Kazakhstan, the Volga region, and the North Caucasus suffered the most,” they argued their decision.