Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree that eased the application process to obtain Russian citizenship for Ukrainians.
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Putin signed the decree, which applies to the entire country, on Monday, extending a previous order that nixed some of the requirements for getting Russian citizenship for residents of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions, according to Russian state media agency TASS.
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Russia’s war in Ukraine, which is now halfway through its fifth month, has been about imposing its will upon its smaller neighbor and erasing Ukraine’s identity. Putin’s move on Monday comes as Russia seeks to further its control in Ukraine.
The expedited citizenship process has been in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions since 2019. From then until this year, 720,000 in the area, roughly 18% of the population, acquired Russian passports. Putin expanded the process to include the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions about a month ago, the Associated Press reported.
Hours earlier, Russian missiles hit an apartment complex in the town of Chasiv Yar in the Donetsk region, killing at least 15 people and leaving dozens buried in the rubble, Ukrainian officials said on Sunday. At the same time, three strikes hit a school, a residential building, and an area near a warehouse in Kharkiv.
In addition to the countless attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, the Russian military’s targeting of Ukrainian cultural sites appears to be “systematic,” a U.S. official said earlier this month.
“Looking at this as a layman, I see a certain degree of systematicity to these crimes, but it’ll be for the experts,” Michael Carpenter, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, told reporters. “We’ll let them pronounce — they’re going to be independent. They’ll make their own determinations.”
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Carpenter warned last week that more than a million and a half Ukrainian civilians have been forcibly moved to Russia, including more than 260,000 children.
“Some of these children have reportedly been abducted by Russian authorities from Ukraine’s orphanages and transferred to Russia for adoption by Russian families,” he explained. “The vast majority of forcibly transferred Ukrainian civilians remain trapped in Russia, without the documents, knowledge, or financial resources to escape, while Russian officials pressure them to give up their Ukrainian citizenship and hopes of ever returning home.”
