Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Against Forced Russian Citizenship

KYIV—As Ukraine gears up for a counteroffensive, Moscow has ramped up its campaign to get Ukrainian civilians in occupied territories to accept Russian citizenship. 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 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 head of We Are Together With Russia, a pro-Kremlin movement in the Zaporizhzhia region, and a member of the region’s Russia-imposed governing council—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.

To a Russian soldier at a checkpoint in a front-line region, a Ukrainian passport is grounds for suspicion. And as testimonies from civilians who lived under occupation indicate, those soldiers operate with impunity. Torture is a widespread method of control. Russia’s system of brutal “filtration camps” reportedly grades Ukrainians by perceived disloyalty.

The latest passportization steps could reflect a practical, if brutal, need to get the most out of a recalcitrant conquered population, say observers. Fedorov believes that Moscow wants the PR benefit of a good turnout from the “new territories” at Russia’s regional elections in September. On May 29, Putin signed a bill allowing elections to go ahead on territories under martial law. It also allows the “forcible and controlled” deportation of citizens to areas not under martial law—areas deep inside Russia.

Then there is the fact that new Russian citizens can be conscripted into the army. It’s a key point in Ukrainian government videos from last year urging citizens under occupation not to take Russian passports. It may be no coincidence that last September, on the same day as the annexation of four Ukrainian regions, Putin also signed a decree easing the path for Russian citizenship for foreigners who fight in Russia’s army. A Russian mobilization thereby forces Ukrainians under occupation to participate in the invasion of their own country—an invasion the Kremlin shows no intention of stopping.

And because that invasion drags on, the Russian authorities need to demonstrate their confidence to civilians in a deeply insecure situation, argued Mykhailo Podolyak, advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during an interview in downtown Kyiv. “In occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, they are less certain of their position, so they’re more likely to burst into houses with weapons demanding that somebody take a passport. In Crimea, they think they’re there for a hundred, two hundred years, so they carry out a more drawn-out process, but still a forcible one,” Podolyak said.

Here in Kyiv, it’s apparent that Ukrainian officials’ declarations that they are determined to liberate Crimea are made in earnest, despite fears that the peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, is a red line for Moscow. Crimea is where passportization began, say officials, and Crimea is where it must end.

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.

Stories such as these have precipitated a fierce debate among Ukrainian policymakers about their legal response to passportization. Shortly after Putin’s decree, Ukrainian Minister of Temporarily Occupied Territories and Reintegration Iryna Vereshchuk advised Ukrainians living under occupation to leave if possible and not take a Russian passport. This prompted a response from the country’s ombudsman, Lubinets, who advised them to accept a Russian passport if they could not leave and their survival was at risk. Vereshchuk, who is also Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, has since told Ukrainian media that her position was misunderstood, and that she and Lubinets are “on the same wavelength” on the issue.

As Volodymyr Yavorskyy of the nongovernmental organization Human Rights House put it, this seeming clash of explanations reflects the tough position in which Ukrainian officials find themselves. They must make one statement in public and another directly to people under occupation. “If you say that Ukrainians can take Russian passports, Russian propagandists will say that Ukraine accepts Russia’s presence on these territories. If you say that people will be criminally responsible for taking Russian passports, that’s the wrong step because it’s not really possible to stay on these territories with only Ukrainian documents,” Yavorskyy said.

Lubinets told Foreign Policy in an email that the vagueness of Putin’s April 27 decree is likely a deliberate attempt to scare Ukrainians into applying for Russian citizenship as soon as possible. He added that as the Ukrainian government does not recognize Russia’s forced passportization, the process is not a grounds for losing Ukrainian citizenship. Moscow has reacted in kind; this March, it passed a law allowing Ukrainians to renounce their citizenship by making a declaration to the Russian, rather than the Ukrainian, authorities.

Podolyak, the presidential advisor, told Foreign Policy that Lubinets’s and Vereshchuk’s statements on the decree were not mutually exclusive. “They’re talking about two different situations. Ms. Vereshchuk is correct in saying that the state cannot accept people taking Russian passports by their own initiative, of their own will, not facing any threats. That’s an unpleasant situation, as it demonstrates a citizen’s disloyalty, as does active participation in the occupying authorities,” he explained at his office in Kyiv.

“Of course, if somebody is forced to give up their Ukrainian passport and take a Russian one under threat, then their life is the most important thing. They haven’t gone through a process of voluntary renunciation of their Ukrainian citizenship. We approach those situations with understanding; that’s passive acceptance, and I stress that it is different,” said Podolyak.

Podolyak suggested that a citizen who took a Russian passport in the first month of occupation would naturally be treated differently from somebody who waited a year and a half before giving in.

Lubinets also stressed the importance of perceived motivation. “After our victory, we will legally give every citizen the opportunity to declare their position and actions,” he wrote—from those who were forced to take Russian passports to survive to those who “compiled lists of Ukrainian children for forced deportation.”

“We should not punish everybody who lives on these territories but nor should we give a blanket amnesty to everybody; this is a state where the rule of law is a founding principle,” said Podolyak.

In short, the reckoning will be done on a case-by-case basis. It will be an enormous undertaking. As longtime observer of the Luhansk Region Brian Milakovsky, wrote, there are grounds to wonder whether a Ukrainian society traumatized by war will be understanding of the choices and dilemmas which their fellow citizens under occupation faced.

In Kyiv, raising the topic of Russia’s passportization elicits a telling phrase—“at the barrel of a gun.” It is a phrase which covers only the most extreme cases of duress. It does not account for what the Ukrainian analyst Elina Beketova called a “web of bureaucratic oppression”—the systematic constriction of the normal lives of Ukrainian citizens.

This is why in September, Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers presented a draft law on the concept of forcible passportization. “It changes the center of legal accountability from those who own a Russian passport to those who put them in the position where they have to accept one,” Podolyak  explained. The bill has yet to be adopted, pending what Podolyak called changes to the current “dynamic situation.”

The bar will be higher for Ukrainian state and local officials; if this law is passed, they will face criminal liability for taking Russian citizenship. So will anybody who propagandizes Russian citizenship.

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.”

The right bank of the Kherson region provides a glimpse of what may be to come. Russian occupation of this area was ended by Ukrainian forces last November, yet Kherson is still heavily shelled by Russian forces across the Dnipro River. This month, the regional prosecutor told Most, a local news outlet, that 162 people were implicated in cases of collaboration with Russia.

Moreover, Most reported that local farmers now feared legal repercussions for having re-registered their land with the Russian authorities—one of the requirements that also compelled locals to receive Russian passports. In response, Ukraine’s Agrarian Council decried the vagueness of laws defining collaboration.

“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.”

Correction, June 12, 2023: A previous version of this article misidentified Vladimir Rogov’s title.