FP: Ukraine’s counteroffensive against forced Russian citizenship

04 June 2023 06:59

As Ukraine gears up for a counteroffensive, Moscow has ramped up its campaign to get Ukrainian civilians in occupied territories to accept Russian citizenship, journalist Maxim Edwards says in an article for Foreign Policy.

Ukrainian officials are now fiercely debating how to treat fellow citizens who have done so.

The catalyst is a new decree signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin on April 27, which states that Ukrainians residing in the illegally annexed territories of Ukraine who have not received Russian citizenship are considered foreigners or stateless individuals. Foreign citizens will have “the right” to reside on these territories until July 2024. No deadline for their registration is given. Disturbingly, they may be deported if they “present a threat to national security.”

Aggressive decrees such as these are just the latest stage of Russia’s “passportization.” Before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began last February, Russia had used this foreign-policy tool in the breakaway states of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria, as well as Ukraine’s Donbas region.

But in those areas of Ukraine occupied since Russia’s invasion started on Feb. 24, 2022, passportization has unfolded in record time. Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin stated on May 30 that since their illegal annexation in September 2022, almost 1.5 million Ukrainians in the four provinces of Ukraine from the four provinces illegally annexed by Russia last year had received Russian passports.

Ivan Fedorov is the mayor of Melitopol, a strategically important Russian-occupied city in southern Ukraine. The first stage of the campaign was to propagandize Russian passports, he told Foreign Policy—though only a handful of local collaborators took them.

“In the second stage, they tried to put up restrictions for Ukrainian citizens; they’d face problems using medical services, education, transport, or health care,” said Fedorov, whose team relocated to the safety of the city of Zaporizhzhia. The mayor’s account of distinct stages to passportization is corroborated by Russian officials’ own statements in local pro-Russian newspapers, such as the official publication of the Kherson occupation authorities. The occupiers first promoted the Russian passport as a birthright and source of pride. Later, they declared the passport as a source of security, giving lengthening lists of the social services which could not be accessed without one. The current stage is the most forceful.

Locals say that business and property owners soon came into the Russians’ sights—the better to indirectly pressure employees and to raise tax revenue for the Russian budget.

“They made Melitopol the administrative center and demanded that all property be re-registered there. They said they’d search for the owners, and if none appeared, the property would be declared vacant and auctioned off. To demonstrate your ownership, you had to come to occupied territory in person with the documents,” said Ihor Semyvolos, a Kyiv-based political analyst with family ties to the Zaporizhzhia region. “After the so-called referendums and annexations, they started to more actively persuade owners, businesses, and so on to receive Russian citizenship. Only after that could they sort out their property rights. And only after that were they guaranteed at least some level of protection from their property being looted,” Semyvolos continued.

“Now people are afraid not only about losing big property; they’re afraid of being deported and losing their house. But even in these conditions, people are refusing to take Russian citizenship. They believe that Ukraine will return,” Semyvolos noted.

Independent estimates of Ukrainians who have taken Russian passports vary wildly. Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s ombudsman, told Foreign Policy that the real number is not known. As early as last June, Vladimir Rogov, the Moscow-imposed governor of the Zaporizhzhia region to which Melitopol belongs, told Russian media that 70,000 people across the region had applied for Russian passports. This came shortly after Putin signed a decree fast-tracking applications for Russian citizenship from the occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine.

However, Fedorov told Foreign Policy last month that in Melitopol, the largest city in the region under Russian occupation, less than 4,000 residents have taken citizenship—and only 1,000 of them enthusiastically.

Neither those who have fled or are yet to be born were exempt. In June, the Russia-imposed authorities of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson declared that all newborns in their respective regions would automatically become Russian citizens. A month after last September’s annexations, Putin even targeted residents of occupied Ukraine who had fled—they had a month to declare their allegiance.

The Russian authorities do not want to wait anymore. Ukrainian media suggest that coercion is becoming more violent, with locals who do not hold Russian passports increasingly harassed at military checkpoints. Residents of the occupied Zaporizhzhia region have told Associated Press reporters that receiving medical treatment required a Russian passport, as did registering a car.

Ukrainian officials who monitor Crimea believe that the peninsula is the testing ground for all Russia’s methods and technologies of occupation. Maria Tomak, head of the Crimea Platform Department at the Office of the Ukrainian President, told Foreign Policy that Crimea is the best-case scenario for Russian policymakers. “They want other occupied territories to resemble it,” said Tomak in an interview in the Ukrainian capital.

Thus, Crimea is important because it shows how passportisation can be played out in the longer term. Nine years after the illegal annexation, the vast majority of locals there are believed by Ukrainian officials to have Russian passports, and thousands of Russian citizens have moved there. Moreover, in 2021 Putin signed a decree adding Crimea to a list of sensitive “border regions” of the country, prohibiting foreign citizens from owning land or property there. It was a potent move to impose Russian citizenship on those who still possessed Ukrainian passports. Nevertheless, some persisted—as in the case of Lenie Umerova, a Crimean Tatar woman arrested last month when she attempted to visit an ailing relative on the occupied peninsula. Family members believe it was precipitated by her still holding a Ukrainian passport.

Andrii Chernousov, the chief lawyer at the Voices of Children Foundation, stresses that the actions and statements of Kyiv officials also play a part in the decisions taken by those under occupation. “People are between two flames. On the one side, they’re afraid that after deoccupation they’ll be prosecuted; on the other, they are pressured by the occupiers who restrict everything,” he said in an interview at the offices of the Kyiv-based charity.

Chernousov emphasized that passportization is only one step in a broader process—“the process of Russification.”

“Many people want simple solutions. Here we are always stuck between zrada [betrayal] and peremoha [victory]. …

Let’s say we prosecute everybody who is against Ukraine—everybody who took passports,” Chernousov explained. “In that case, I see no prospects not only for deoccupation of these territories, but more importantly—their reintegration.”

Who is the “he” quoted here? Podolyak? If so, his name should be here, since this quote could currently be misread as a continuation of the quote from Bektova in the previous paragraph, which isn’t the case.

Caliber.Az

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