President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky submitted to the Verkhovna Rada a draft of a new version of the law on citizenship. It involves the introduction of multiple citizenship with near countries, including for the descendants of ethnic Ukrainians and foreign volunteers, as well as deprivation of citizenship for “voluntarily receiving” a passport from the “aggressor country.”
The grounds for deprivation of Ukrainian citizenship are given in Article 20 of the draft law. The first is the “voluntary acquisition” of citizenship of Russia and other countries that are not subject to multiple citizenship.
The draft provides for exceptions, such as automatic acquisition of another citizenship upon birth, adoption or marriage to a foreigner. A separate paragraph includes cases when a person automatically receives citizenship of another country, but does not take away its passport or any other document. The situation in the occupied territories of the country is not discussed directly there.
The grounds for deprivation of Ukrainian citizenship also included “participation in military aggression against Ukraine,” serving under a contract in an “aggressor country,” “creating threats to national security,” and refusal to take an exam in the Ukrainian language and history.
Documents, please. Where and how many Russian passports were distributed to residents of the occupied Ukrainian regions
According to Russian authorities, from 2016 to 2020, almost 1 million Ukrainians received Russian citizenship — including residents of Donbass, where the authorities of the self-proclaimed republics distributed their passports.
After the start of the war, President Vladimir Putin initially simplified obtaining citizenship for all Ukrainians, regardless of place of residence. After the annexation of the occupied regions of Ukraine in September 2022, their residents began to be automatically recognized as Russian citizens if they took an oath. According to Mediazona’s calculations based on data from the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, almost 300 thousand Ukrainians received citizenship in just 2022.