During the summer of 1944, the Ukrainian NKVD conducted an investigation of Genia Brand, a returnee from Osh (Kirghiz SSR) accused of spreading ethnic hatred after confronting those she believed had stolen her property during the occupation. On July 13, Brand told her investigators:

While Brand spoke of “Russians,” she likely meant “Ukrainians,” for few trumpeted the latter's interests during the civil war to the city's west. There can be little doubt, however, that some returnees desired revenge against the formerly occupied thought to have taken advantage of an empty Kyiv. The Ukrainian capital's relentless population growth created a vicious cycle of rumors and made the local Communists’ efforts to lead more difficult.

At a session of Kyiv's Ukrainian NKVD Military Tribunal on August 3, 1944, Brand's neighbor, Sophiia Mazur, had her testimony to the investigation read out: “In April 1944, Brand told me the whole population who lived through the occupation would be exiled from Kyiv and from Ukraine itself and that the population that had not lived under the occupants would be settled here. With such conversations, Genia terrorized everyone in the building.” Testimony from one of Brand's acquaintances, Anna Rozhdestvenskaia, contained a similar message: “She told me and other inhabitants of our house that soon there would be many free apartments… . After these conversations, the inhabitants of our building began to worry about the possibility of eviction.