Traces of Ukrainian landscapes are instances of the living dead in the currently ‘Russian’ Crimea. What remains of Ukraine is hardly present, but is still perceivable. This paper has as its goal to revisit and reclaim the Ukrainian landscapes following the call in sociolinguistics more generally, and the semiotic landscapes research in particular, in its attempt to de-centre from the ‘linguistic’ in language (Pennycook, 2017; Thurlow, 2016). As advocated by more critically oriented theorists, the paper turns towards ‘otherwise perceivable signs’ (e.g. Domke, 2018), attempting to create a sense of non-existence (Karlander, 2019), by looking at Ukrainian ‘zombie landscapes’ (Bock & Stroud, 2018)in today’s Crimea.  While keeping the focus on the processes of erasure and negation of claims for Ukrainian statehood in Crimea, this paper also seeks to offer an analysis of performative re-writings of physical spaces of peninsula. It looks at 1) attempts to produce voids through physical deletion and removal of the signs of Ukrainian statehood that go together with 2) the reinsertion of ‘Russian’ meanings that ‘correct’ the ‘wrongs’ of the past. The repetition of these re-enactments across public spaces of Crimea reinvokes the structure of domination (cf. Butler, 2013: 18) and reinscribes a certain image of reality that the inhabitants are forced to adapt to. Closely looking at the instances in semiotic landscapes where the exclusions and insertions are systematically produced, I show that the rewritings do not go unnoticed, but leave haunting traces (Gordon, 2008) of violence. The ‘holed’, ‘shadowed’, ‘faded’, and ‘layered’ traces over-written with new names do not produce a neat image of the new Russian state over-night, but reveal the attempts to violently break with the past. In short, the explorations of this case study reveal failed attempts to use the performative power of language and semiosis by the occupational regime to negate any sign of Ukrainian presence and to re-enact the ‘new’ ‘Russian’ reality in Crimea.