April 25, 2019

Moscow goes ahead with cementing Donbass separation from Ukraine

located:	Russia, Ukraine
editor:	Igor Serebryany

President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on the April 24, which allows the residents of Ukraine’s two breakaway regions to apply for a Russian passport without a need to move to Russia permanently.

The decree guarantees that applicants will obtain Russian citizenship within only three months after filing for the application to the nearest Interior Ministry’s office across the Russia-Ukraine border.

Thus, the residents of the seceded Donetsk and Lugansk regions have been given equal rights to the citizens of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan – which form a Customs Union with Russia.

Nationals of all other countries have to live in Russia for five years to earn the right to apply for its passport.

Some well-informed persons in Moscow said earlier that the decree had been drafted some time ago and ready for signing, but that the Kremlin wanted to see it first what the new Ukrainian President’s actions would be. As the decree was signed just three days after Vladimir Zelensky had won the elections by a landslide on Sunday, it looks as though the Kremlin feels bitter disappointment over the developments in Kiev.

Former Commander-in-Chief of the self-proclaimed Donetsk Republic, Igor Strelkov, welcomes Putin’s latest decree. “It’s better late than never. Five years in, Moscow eventually realises that Donbass will never reunite with Ukraine”, he said.

Strelkov foresees that Russia will provide as many Donbass residents as possible with its passports, as it had once made in South Ossetia, another breakaway region. Over 80 percent of South Ossetians are the nationals of the Russian Federation, and Moscow used this very fact as ripe ground to recognise the province’s independence from Georgia in 2008.

Putin’s latest decree is not about the Donbass people, it is about Ukrainian domestic affairs, and constitutes another operation in the hybrid war Russia wages on Ukraine, Director of the Global Strategies Institute in Kiev Vadim Karasev believes.

“This is an open message to the president-elect Zelensky to mute his anti-Russian rhetoric. If Zelensky understands the hint, Putin is in position to call off his decree at any time. If not, Kiev will face a situation where several million people within Ukrainian borders will bear foreign passports. That situation will be impossible to reverse”, Karasev says.

Unlike some countries, Ukraine does not recognise dual citizenship. So if Moscow goes ahead with its plans to “naturalise” the residents of Donbass, it will render the territories’ reintegration into Ukraine impossible by default.