 Russia's "passportisation" of the Donbas: The mass naturalisation of Ukrainians is more than a foreign policy toolFabian Burkhardt No 41/2020, SWP Comments from Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), German Institute for International and Security Affairs Abstract: Russia has so far issued almost 200,000 Russian passports to Ukrainians from the 'People's Republics' of Donetsk and Luhansk. This undermines the Minsk peace process. The passportisation of the Donbas is part of a tried and tested set of foreign policy instruments. Russia is deliberately making it more difficult to resolve territorial conflicts in the post-Soviet space by creating controlled instability. This demonstrative intervention in state sovereignty exerts pressure on the Ukrainian central government in Kyiv. Domestically, Russia's goal is to counteract its own natural population decline through immigration. Because of the war in eastern Ukraine, more and more Ukrainians have migrated to Russia; this was one of the reasons behind Russia revising its migration strategy in 2018. The liberalisation of citizenship legislation was aimed particularly at Ukraine. By delaying any resolution to the conflict, Russia achieves two objectives simultaneously: it retains permanent influence on Ukraine via the Donbas, and it becomes more attractive to many Ukrainians as a destination for emigration. Date: 2020 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:swpcom:412020 DOI: 10.18449/2020C41 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in SWP Comments from Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), German Institute for International and Security Affairs |
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