After the beginning of the invasion of the territory of Ukraine in 2014, the Russian Federation began to use the tools of imposing Russian citizenship on the population of the occupied territories. The first victims of this policy were the residents of occupied Crimea. The Russian Federation began to automatically consider everyone who lived on the territory of the peninsula at the time of its occupation as citizens of Russia, if within a month they did not apply for the renunciation of Russian citizenship. The next step was the imposition of Russian citizenship in certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which, unlike Crimea, took place in the form of simplifying the acquisition of citizenship with simultaneous restriction of the rights of persons who did not receive Russian citizenship. With the beginning of the full-scale invasion of the occupied territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, Russia continued to implement this scenario - obtaining Russian citizenship is possible in a simplified manner, and involves submitting an application to renounce Ukrainian citizenship. But at the same time, more actively than before, the occupying authorities of the Russian Federation apply the practice of creating such conditions under which it is impossible for Ukrainians to live in the occupied territory if they do not have a passport of a citizen of the Russian Federation.
Download the research
