Lands of destroyed settlements in Ukraine: legal regime, land use conversion, and the economics of post-settlement territories

Abstract

The article examines the lands of destroyed settlements in Ukraine as a new object of land-law and land-use planning regulation emerging under the conditions of full-scale war and not reducible to the conventional issues of physical reconstruction. It is substantiated that the universalization of the “build back better” paradigm is methodologically insufficient for the Ukrainian context, since some destroyed cities, towns, and villages have objectively lost, or are likely to lose, the capacity to be restored as fully functioning settlements due to the combined impact of security-related, demographic, economic, and infrastructural factors. It is shown that war-related destruction does not transform the territory of a settlement into a legally free space: even under conditions of actual depopulation, such territory remains structured by a multiplicity of private and public real rights to land, immovable property, and other assets, which makes its spontaneous transition to a new use impossible in the absence of a special legal mechanism. The purpose of the study is to develop an integral scientific and practical concept of the legal regime of the lands of destroyed settlements, to determine the criteria for their actual loss of settlement viability, to elaborate a legally sound algorithm for the land-use conversion of such territories, and to substantiate the institutional and economic model of their further use. The methodological basis of the study includes the analysis of Ukrainian normative legal acts, international programmatic and analytical documents, and official data on destruction, population displacement, and humanitarian demining. The working concepts of the “zone of settlement disintegration” and “war greyfields” are proposed to denote former settlement territories irreversibly damaged by war and deprived of a realistic prospect of restoration as places of permanent residence. The need for a special legal regime is substantiated; such a regime should combine an audit of settlement viability, inventory of land and property, identification of rights holders, voluntary buyout or compulsory acquisition with proper compensation, deposit of funds for unidentified persons, clearance, land reclamation, and subsequent change of the functional use of the territory. The practical value of the article lies in the formation of a conceptually and instrumentally coherent framework for the transition from a policy of reconstruction to a policy of lawful conversion of territories that have lost their settlement function, and for preventing their long-term spatial abandonment.

Received: 16.03.2026;

Accepted: 06.04.2026;