In moments of war, a society’s foundations are tested in the harshest ways. Ukraine’s experience since Russia’s 2022 invasion is a powerful example — a nation torn apart not only by the immediate violence of tanks and missiles, but also by the quiet, lasting devastation of losing what people own.
Property rights are not merely technical. They are the bedrock of dignity, belonging, and future investment. When families cannot prove their claim to a piece of land or a roof over their heads, they lose far more than an asset — they lose their security, their future, and often their very identity.
A 2022 rapid needs assessment, published with contributions from the Global Land Alliance, De Montfort University, the Kyiv School of Economics, and other partners, lays bare the scale of the problem:
- Over 1.2 million Ukrainian families have had their homes damaged or destroyed
- An estimated 3 million people have lost or risk losing their housing rights
- Archives, deeds, and public records have been looted, burned, or lost
- More than 13 million hectares of farmland are at risk of mines or munitions contamination
- Many displaced Ukrainians have no way to prove their ownership
This is not a uniquely Ukrainian story. This is a global cautionary tale.
Paper Titles Are No Match for Fire, Flood, or War
For centuries, land ownership has depended on physical deeds. Paper is cheap, simple, and — in peacetime — reliable enough. But it is also fragile.
War shows how quickly paper burns. Floods show how quickly it dissolves. Corruption shows how easily it can be stolen, forged, or hidden away.
In Ukraine, the vulnerability of paper-based systems has been tragically exposed. Before the war, only about 40% of property titles were fully digitized in the national electronic registry. Many rural and older urban properties still depended on Soviet-era documents or on local archives. When Russian troops and artillery destroyed city halls, regional land offices, and court buildings, thousands of records vanished with them.
Even in the best-case scenario, recovering paper deeds from bombed-out buildings is impossible. That means millions of Ukrainians will be forced to enter lengthy, uncertain, and often corrupt restitution systems to prove that the land or house they lived in for generations truly belonged to them.
What Ukraine Teaches the World
Ukraine’s tragedy is a profound lesson for the global land rights movement. From Sudan to Syria, Haiti to Pakistan, natural disasters, climate change, and conflict threaten land tenure every year. It is not an exaggeration to say that hundreds of millions of people globally live on land that is only as secure as a piece of paper in a local drawer.
In fragile and conflict-affected regions, this becomes a license for the powerful — whether armed groups, criminal networks, or corrupt officials — to grab land from the powerless. When a person cannot produce a document to prove ownership, they often have no practical means to fight back.
Ukraine’s policy assessment specifically called for digitization of archives, creation of interoperable databases, and even the use of remote-sensing data to help validate ownership. These are important steps. But they still suffer from one fundamental weakness: they rely on centralized systems. Servers can be hacked or physically destroyed. Governments can be captured or corrupted.
Blockchain: Resilience by Design
That is why Landano’s mission matters. Blockchain is not just a digital ledger — it is a resilience technology. Unlike a traditional database stored on one or two servers, blockchain distributes copies of every record across a global network. No single failure, no single bomb, no single corrupt official can alter or erase it.
Imagine if Ukraine’s land records had been recorded on blockchain before the war. A farmer in Donbas, displaced to Poland or Germany, could still cryptographically prove her claim. A bank in Lviv could instantly verify the ownership of a damaged apartment for compensation claims. Insurance payouts could be triggered automatically by smart contracts tied to trusted damage reports.
Blockchain makes fraud nearly impossible because records cannot be changed without cryptographic consensus. Ownership is transparent, traceable, and auditable by anyone who needs to see it. Most importantly, it is borderless — it works even when physical government offices are destroyed or occupied.
Landano’s Vision
Landano was founded on a simple but powerful idea: that people deserve land records that cannot burn, drown, or vanish. We believe land is more than an asset — it is the foundation of generational wealth, stability, and community. When that foundation is fragile, society is fragile.
By leveraging blockchain, Landano seeks to build a new standard for property rights:
Tamper-proof: no one can alter your title without consensus.
Globally accessible: titles recoverable even in exile.
Disaster-resistant: no flood, fire, or war can destroy the chain.
Community-owned: local authorities and communities can co-govern the system.
These features directly answer the vulnerabilities laid bare by Ukraine’s war. They are not theoretical. They are the natural evolution of land rights technology.
Policy Reflections from Ukraine
The Ukrainian government, to its credit, is working to build a more modern land system in the aftermath of invasion. According to the rapid needs assessment, officials have:
- Established a digital loss-reporting system via the Diia platform
- Proposed a law (#7198) to govern compensation for damaged properties
- Created a Registry of Damaged and Destroyed Property to centralize evidence
- Encouraged the use of satellite imagery for verification
These efforts are vital. But as the policy brief notes, they face severe challenges:
- Massive backlogs due to the scale of destruction
- Only partial digitization of old deeds
- Huge numbers of people without any documentation at all
- Corruption risks in centralized processes
Landano’s approach could complement these efforts. A blockchain-based property registry could act as a trust anchor, providing verifiable, unalterable records that integrate with national systems while guaranteeing resilience beyond them.
A Global Wake-Up Call
For the rest of the world, Ukraine should serve as a wake-up call. We cannot wait for the next war, hurricane, or flood to wipe out land records before modernizing. We need to build secure, decentralized, community-driven registries now, before the next disaster strikes.
Consider these examples:
Haiti, after the 2010 earthquake, faced years of bitter land disputes because property archives were buried in rubble.
Pakistan, after the 2022 floods, saw entire villages unable to prove land rights when paper deeds washed away.
Syria, with entire towns displaced, struggles with proving ownership of farmlands amid lost or falsified records.
In all these places, blockchain could have given survivors the ability to stand on solid ground, legally and financially.
A Human Right to Proof
At its heart, this is about human dignity. Land is more than dirt and concrete. It is where your ancestors lived, where your children will grow, where your memories reside. When you lose proof of your land, you lose the ability to protect your family’s past and invest in its future.
Blockchain gives us the tools to protect that proof. And projects like Landano are working to turn those tools into real, accessible, community-driven systems.
This is not a matter of selling technology for its own sake. It is a matter of justice — of ensuring that no one is made homeless by a corrupt official, no one is dispossessed by war, no one is erased because a piece of paper burned.
Looking Ahead
Ukraine will rebuild. Its people will return and lay new foundations. But if those foundations rest once again on paper alone, they will remain vulnerable. As the country digitizes, it must also decentralize. Blockchain should be part of that conversation.
At Landano, we are ready to stand with communities across the world to build these next-generation systems. We believe every community — whether in Ghana, Ukraine, or anywhere else — deserves a land rights system that is as resilient as its people.
Because when paper burns, blockchain endures.