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‘A false semblance of choice’. Putin’s latest passportization deadline dials up the pressure on civilians in Ukraine’s occupied territories
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Ukrainians living under occupation have long faced pressure to assume Russian citizenship. But in March, Vladimir Putin turned things up a notch. In a decree aimed at boosting the Kremlin’s campaign to force Russian passports on Ukrainians in Russia and occupied territories, Putin demanded that residents obtain Russian passports, “leave” by September 10, or refuse and face the consequences. Both Ukrainian officials and human rights groups have condemned the decree as a violation of international law, warning that it opens the door for further war crimes. As experts told Meduza, Putin’s executive order simply presents a “false semblance of choice” while creating new pretexts for arrests and expulsions. Russia’s retaliation against Ukrainians who refuse to change their citizenship has been well documented, and those who want to “leave” occupied areas can’t necessarily do so safely. What’s more, even “deportation” is not a guarantee of being returned to Ukraine.
On March 20, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree ordering Ukrainian citizens living in Russia and four partially occupied regions of Ukraine to “regulate their legal status” or “leave on their own” by September 10. Those who fail to comply, according to the decree, will be automatically classified as “foreigners” and face retaliation, including possible detention and deportation.
The executive order specifically targets Ukrainian citizens living in the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions, which Russia claimed to annex in September 2022. Nearly three years later, Russian forces still do not fully control any of these regions. All the same, Russian authorities say they have issued some 3.5 million passports to local residents as part of a “mass passportization” effort.
The March decree echoes another executive order from April 2023, which mandated that Ukrainian citizens in the aforementioned occupied regions legalize their residency or “leave” by July 2024. But whereas this previous decree threatened deportation for those who Russia claimed posed a “threat to national security,” this new decree lowers the bureaucratic barrier for detention and deportation.
“The formal justification doesn’t have to be this ‘threat’ to national security and the constitutional order of Russia. It’s either not having a Russian passport or not formally registering as a ‘foreigner’ in the annexed territories. So, in a sense, it’s really tightening the screws,” explains Fabian Burkhardt, a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies. “Now, it’s definitely going to be a lot easier for them [local security forces] to put pressure on those who have so far managed to remain in this grey zone where you could still more or less survive without these formal Russian documents.”
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Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry immediately condemned the decree, appealing to the International Criminal Court to consider it “additional evidence” of war crimes. “We believe that this act is null and void. It is the next step in Russia's campaign of discriminating against, persecuting, and forcibly displacing Ukrainian citizens from their native land,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Heorhii Tykhyi said the day after the decree was announced. “We emphasize that these systematic deportations and persecutions are part of Russia’s genocide policy against the Ukrainian people.”
Human rights experts have expressed similar concerns, slamming the decree as a violation of international law and the laws of occupation that’s also paving the way for Russia to commit further war crimes. “Passportization is a highly unusual practice in the modern era and it’s something that I would argue quite strongly is probative of genocidal intent,” says Kristina Hook, an atrocity prevention expert and assistant professor at Kennesaw State University.
“The Russian Federation has absolutely no legal claims to these Ukrainian territories, nor the right to expel residents from their homes, their communities, and their internationally recognized country,” Hook underscores.
Forced naturalization
Russia’s passportization campaign in Ukraine has been ongoing since its annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. Following its 2022 invasion, Moscow extended this policy to the newly occupied territories. The campaign combines coercion and restrictions, limiting access to humanitarian aid, medical care, social benefits, employment, and property rights for residents without Russian passports.
In June 2024, the European Court of Human Rights found Russia responsible for systematic human rights violations in Crimea, including making it impossible for residents to opt out of Russian citizenship.
Putin’s March decree only intensifies this campaign. “You see that thread of continuity in Russia’s occupation policy towards Ukraine,” says Karolina Hird, a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) who tracks developments in the occupied territories. “This [is the] continued codification of coercive methods to try and passportize vast segments of the population in occupied Ukraine, to basically strengthen the Kremlin’s false claim that these territories and these people are Russian.”
As Burkhardt explains, there are currently two bureaucratic processes underpinning Russia’s passportization drive. In occupied territories that Moscow hasn’t formally annexed, residents are subjected to what he describes as “forced naturalization by application” — meaning they face pressure to apply for fast-tracked Russian citizenship. In the regions the Kremlin claims to have annexed, however, occupying authorities consider all residents Russian citizens who just need to obtain the necessary papers — a humiliating process for Ukrainians because it involves swearing an oath to the Russian Federation.
“[The] level of coercion is really on a continuum,” Burkhardt says. “During automatic naturalization after annexation, there’s really not that much leeway or choice left, though we know that not everyone in the annexed territories has a Russian passport.”
Under Ukrainian law, obtaining a Russian passport during occupation is not considered a crime or grounds for loss of Ukrainian citizenship. Ukraine also does not consider the renunciation of citizenship under occupation legitimate. “There are millions of reasons why people [might] have stayed in the occupied territories. Not all of them are traitors and not all of them are pro-Russian supporters,” underscores Elina Beketova, a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) who monitors developments in Ukraine’s occupied territories. “The Ukrainian government understands that people need [Russian] passports to survive on that territory.”
At the same time, Ukrainian officials have made contradictory statements in this regard. Following Putin’s 2023 decree, then-Reintegation Minister Iryna Vereshchuk urged residents of the occupied territories to resist taking Russian passports. In turn, Lubinets encouraged them to “make a decision to survive.”
‘Preventative measures’
Occupation authorities have made taking a Russian passport a matter of survival through various coercive measures. Following the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in June 2023, for instance, reports emerged that occupying forces in some flood-afflicted areas were only evacuating Russian passport-holders. In turn, Amnesty International reported that evacuees without Russian passports were forced to undergo “filtration” — a grueling registration and screening process involving interrogations and, in many cases, prolonged detention.
“This bureaucratic decree is actually a tool that the Russian government will use to figure out who is resisting them, and to wield violence against those people in an effort to control their behavior,” Hook says, referring to Putin’s latest passportization order.
This decree has already set off a new wave of repression. Occupation authorities in the Kherson and Donetsk regions, as well as in Crimea, began implementing “preventative measures” in late March, inspecting hundreds of homes and verifying residents’ documents to ensure compliance with “migration legislation.”
The Kherson occupation administration shared photos and videos of the sweeps on Telegram, showing armed Russian National Guard (Rosgvardiya) and FSB officers searching homes, detaining residents at gunpoint, and collecting fingerprints. At least 82 “foreign citizens” were charged with misdemeanors. “Procedural decisions are being made regarding their future stay on the territory of the Russian Federation,” the occupation administration said.
In Donske, a small village in the Donetsk region, occupation police reportedly searched hundreds of homes for “illegal migrants” and then proceeded to “help” residents apply for Russian passports and re-register vehicles with Ukrainian license plates. “These law enforcement ‘migration raids’ are supposed to check people’s documentation, but they also just instill a lot of fear in communities,” says Hird. “They want people to know that they’re doing this to further encourage them to get Russian documentation.”
READ MORE ABOUT RUSSIAN OCCUPATION
In another recent example of limiting access to basic services, occupation authorities in the Kherson region have given local residents until July 1 to re-register their SIM cards under a Russian passport. And as of April 1, Russian road safety law requires drivers in the occupied territories to obtain Russian licenses by 2026 — another process that involves presenting a Russian passport or residence permit. “These lower-level laws and decrees that you wouldn’t necessarily think of because they’re not at the presidential level are really facilitating passportization efforts on a more local scale,” Hird says.
According to Burkhardt, this apparent spike in enforcement activity speaks to how the Kremlin governs occupied areas of Ukraine. Under Sergey Kiriyenko, Putin’s domestic policy czar and overseer of the occupied territories, Russia’s local operatives are tasked with meeting “key performance indicators,” and they act accordingly. “Basically, when Putin passes such a decree, it sets incentives for local agents,” Burkhardt explains. “It really seems to be a game between the local occupation administrations and the Kremlin.”
Just weeks before issuing his March decree, Putin claimed that passportization in Russian-controlled areas of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions was “virtually completed” last year. The way Burkhardt sees it, this is indicative of a gap between Moscow’s orders and on-the-ground enforcement, which also suggests that the September 10 deadline may be entirely arbitrary. “It could be that the implementation will drag on for quite some time,” he speculates.
‘Leave on your own’
While the March decree states that Ukrainian nationals in Russia and the annexed territories have the option to “leave on their own,” this is not so straightforward in practice. “This decree, like previous legal decrees, sets up this false semblance of choice,” says Hird. “It’s not feasible for people living in occupied Ukraine to just pack up and drive across the front line and get to non-occupied Ukraine. The only egress points are through Russia.”
Russian forces shut down the last direct route connecting occupied areas to Ukrainian government-controlled territory, the Vasylivka checkpoint in the Zaporizhzhia region, in late 2022. From then on, Ukrainians trying to escape occupation had to take circuitous routes through Russia and its ally, Belarus, to reach a border crossing with Ukraine or a friendly country, passing through filtration sites along the way. The last border crossing between Russia and Ukraine, the Kolotilovka-Pokrovka checkpoint, closed in August 2024 after Kyiv launched an incursion into Russian territory.
As Hird explains,
“The process of leaving is overseen and controlled by the Russians at every step. The border control points between occupied Ukraine and Russia are really dangerous for Ukrainians because that’s where you see a lot of ‘filtration’ practices: people are checked for documents, tattoos that would indicate that they’re pro-Ukrainian, their devices are checked, that sort of thing. So it is truly not the case that you can just leave.”
According to both Hook and Beketova, fear of undergoing filtration is often among the deciding factors for people who have remained in these areas — especially for those with family members in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. “In some cases, people just didn’t want to leave because they wouldn’t get through the filtration procedure,” Beketova says. “They thought it would be safer for them to stay.”
READ MORE ABOUT FILTRATION
“It’s an ‘option to leave’ in word only, I would say. And we certainly can’t say that Ukrainians would be protected or perceived as safe to try to leave,” Hook says. “It’s population control, which is very important — it’s something we look for in genocidal cases,” she adds.
Ukrainian authorities estimate that as many as six million people are still living in the occupied territories, including some 1.5 million children. International law prohibits Russia from trying to change the demographics of occupied areas or forcibly transferring local populations. While both are considered war crimes, the latter could also constitute a crime against humanity, according to Human Rights Watch.
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Putin and his Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for war crimes, accusing them of overseeing the illegal deportations of children from Ukraine’s occupied territories to Russia. The Ukrainian authorities say they have verified Russia’s deportation of more than 19,500 children from occupied areas. Only around 1,300 of them have been returned to Ukraine so far.
According to Hook, Russia’s moves to deport or expel Ukrainians from occupied areas go “hand in hand” with the sheer number of refugees the war has created. Per U.N. data, there are currently more than five million Ukrainian refugees globally, including more than a million in Russia. Another five million people in Ukraine are registered as internally displaced, including roughly 3.6 million who fled their homes after the 2022 invasion. “Combined with extensive evidence of forcible Russification policies, Russian authorities’ attempts to destroy the Ukrainian national group in part, including through forcible, illegal displacements from their homelands, serves as another marker of genocidal policies,” she says.
READ MORE ABOUT RUSSIFICATION
‘You have only one way out’
While Putin’s March decree pressures Ukrainians in the occupied territories to take Russian citizenship under threat of deportation, human rights experts fear it will actually land more civilians in Russian captivity. “Deportation is really a black hole because there’s not good information about where they’re going to be deported to,” says Hird. “When Russia says they’re ‘deporting’ someone, they’re not deporting them back to Ukraine.”
Russian security forces have been abducting and detaining residents in occupied areas throughout the war. Last December, Ukrainian Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets reported that more than 16,000 Ukrainian civilians are being held in Russian captivity. Thousands of others are considered missing. “We have seen this effort into the future in terms of continuing violent control over Ukrainians, including through the prison camp system,” Hook says, pointing to Associated Press reporting on Russia’s plans to expand its network of prisons in occupied Ukraine.
In March, the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine declared that Russia’s “widespread and systematic” use of enforced disappearances and torture against Ukrainian civilians during the full-scale invasion amounts to crimes against humanity. “Russian detention centers are notoriously not safe places to be, and they’re especially not safe places to be a Ukrainian,” Hird stresses.
In May, Lubinets reported that only 174 Ukrainian civilians had been repatriated through prisoner swaps. Under international law, such exchanges are only supposed to involve prisoners of war. During a “1,000-for-1,000” prisoner exchange later that month, Russia and Ukraine handed over 120 civilians each. “[The Russian authorities] don’t perceive these people as civilian citizens of Ukraine,” Beketova says. “They treat them as prisoners of war because they are ‘disloyal’ to them.”
INSIDE RUSSIA’S SECRET PRISONS
There are relatively few documented cases of Russia returning “deported” Ukrainians directly to Ukraine. During the first year of the full-scale invasion, the U.N. Human Rights Office reported that Russian forces were unlawfully expelling civilians into Ukrainian-controlled territory through the Vasylivka checkpoint in the Zaporizhzhia region. However, this apparently stopped when the crossing closed in late 2022.
Since at least 2023, Russia has been expelling Ukrainian citizens deemed “security threats” — including those who refused to take Russian passports — via its land border with Georgia, according to media reports. The investigative outlet iStories recently revealed several cases of Ukrainian civilians who suffered months of abuse in Russian captivity before they were dropped off at the Verkhny Lars crossing with deportation orders banning them from entering the Russian Federation for decades.
Maria Belkina, the founder of Volunteers Tbilisi, says that her aid organization has seen multiple cases of “deported” Ukrainian nationals left at the Russia–Georgia border. This includes civilians from the likes of Melitopol, a city in the Zaporizhzhia region that’s been under Russian control since March 2022, and convicts who were in Ukrainian prisons when the war broke out, whom occupation forces later transferred to prisons inside Russia.
Vikradeni Melitopoltsi, a group that monitors abductions in Melitopol, told iStories that they’ve recorded 17 cases of deportations to Georgia in 2024–2025, but they believe the real figure may be higher.
According to Belkina, Ukrainian nationals deported from Russia often arrive at the Georgian border without a shred of paperwork. “Some of them think it’s a good idea to drop it somewhere near the border [rather than] show it to the border guards. Mostly, they have nothing,” she explains. In her view, the Russian authorities are taking advantage of the fact that Georgia has been lenient about letting Ukrainians enter the country. “If you have no documents, no foreign passport, or just a Ukrainian domestic passport, you have only one way [out of Russia] — to go to Georgia,” she says.
Once in Georgia, Ukrainian nationals lacking documentation can obtain a “white passport” through their country’s embassy — a temporary travel document that allows them to return to Ukraine. But former inmates in particular have spent weeks stranded in “basements” in the Georgian border zone, awaiting background checks.
Georgian officials have not publicly commented on the deportations. In April, the Georgian government rolled back visa-free stays for Ukrainians from three years to one year without providing any explanation.
‘Double pressure’
Although Russia previously attempted to frame its passportization policy as “more carrots rather than sticks,” Beketova sees Putin’s latest decree as a signal to Ukrainians living in the occupied territories that it’s time to pick a side. At the same time, there are risks associated with taking Russian citizenship.
“It’s part of the Russian authorities asserting that they can put domestic legislative control over Ukrainian adults and children,” Hook explains. Draft-age men, for example, become vulnerable to conscription into the Russian army (another violation of international law). And naturalized Russian citizens who refuse to enlist or are convicted of certain crimes can have their citizenship revoked. “If you’re naturalized, you’re still a second-class Russian citizen,” Burkhardt says.
READ MORE ABOUT NATURALIZATION IN RUSSIA
For residents of the occupied territories, he explains, this creates a “double pressure.” Having been coerced into taking Russian passports, they always run the risk of having this citizenship — and the “benefits” it affords them — stripped away. Then there’s the fact that the Kremlin has long used the pretense of “protecting Russians” to justify its aggression and territorial claims against Ukraine. In this context, forced naturalization “is really one of the key mechanisms of Russification and making the claim to these territories as irreversible as possible from the Russian perspective,” Burkhardt says.
“Part of the psychology of terror by Russian authorities is to say, ‘We are here, and we are never leaving,’” Hook recalls. “I think this [decree] is part of that psychology of trying to wear people down, terrorize them, control them, and for any that don’t [comply], identify them and target them with violence.”
While Hook warns that Putin’s decree could accelerate deportations from the occupied territories, Burkhardt notes that there are “trade-offs” to this policy. “These local security forces have their incentives for implementing policy, but they also don’t want to overdo it,” he says. “If they bus people by the hundreds to the border with Georgia, that might create problems with Georgia, as well.”
Mass deportations, Burkhardt adds, would also undermine the Kremlin’s claims that it is successfully “integrating” occupied Ukrainian territories into Russia. Although he notes that this might not be enough to make officials think twice. “We often try to rationalize Russian policy [by saying], ‘Okay, this really looks bad, so they won’t do it,’” he says. “But in the end, they do a lot of stuff that looks bad to the whole world.”
Story by Eilish Hart
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