This paper explores the workings of a core element in the financial armature behind the consolidation of russian control over the Ukrainian territories it seized and laid to waste following the full-scale invasion of 2022: the 2% preferential mortgage (lgotnaya ipoteka) for the purchase of housing in the so-called “new territories”, financed by the russian federal Ministry of Construction. The 2% rate is dramatically lower than the c. 25-30% average commercial rates offered in 2025 for the purchase of housing on the internationally-recognised territory of the Russian federation. The preferential rates are de facto not available to remaining inhabitants of the occupied territories, who have in many instances been made homeless not only by the russian war machine but by the demolition of their surviving homes to make way for new speculative apartment buildings intended for settlers from “big russia”. Thinking with the work of Ukrainian researchers Svitlana Matviyneko and Daria Hetmanova, this paper interrogates the preferential mortgage scheme as a core element in the planned replacement, or “permanent filtration” of indigenous Ukrainians, whose loyalty to the occupying state is always-already suspect; but also a technology whose playbook is systemically consistent with the vertical governance structure, technobanal ethic and capitalist realist aesthetic of the post-1991 russian authoritarian neoliberal “construction complex” (stroikompleks). In conversation with historical scholarship on the use of the mortgage as a device of settler colonisation, it presents the lgotnaya ipoteka as a node within a recolonial ideological constellation, which I call “russian worlding” (russkie mirstvovanie), programmed into the stroikompleks’ base and superstructure.
Michał Murawski is an anthropologist of architecture and cities. He is Associate Professor of Critical Area Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. He is the author of A Form of Friendship: The Museum on the Square (Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw & University of Chicago Press, 2024), Only to Hell: Architecture, Ecology and Violence in Russia (MIT Press, 2026) and The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw and a City Transfixed (Indiana University Press, 2019). In 2025, Michał is co-curator (with Bogdana Kosmina and Katerya Rusetska) of DAKH (ДАХ): Vernacular Hardcore, the pavilion of the Republic of Ukraine at the 19th Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2025 (www.michalmurawski.net).