Russian President Vladimir Putin’s move to grant passports to Russian-speaking citizens of eastern Ukraine marks a new stage in the “assault” on the former Soviet satellite state he started in 2014, according to U.S. officials.
“The United States condemns today’s decision by President Putin to provide expedited Russian citizenship to Ukrainians living in Russia-controlled eastern Ukraine,” State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said Wednesday. “Russia, through this highly provocative action, is intensifying its assault on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
Putin issued an order establishing a “simplified procedure” for some Ukrainians to apply for Russian citizenship. The decision applies to residents of Donetsk and Lugansk, the territories that declared independence from the central government in Kiev in 2014, shortly after Putin annexed Crimea from Ukraine. Separatists in the Donbass region have been fighting the Ukrainian military with the backing of unmarked Russian military.
Putin denies that Russia invaded eastern Ukraine, but the decision to grant citizenship to people in the contested territories could establish a pretext for open intervention in the conflict. “Russia’s Interior Ministry, Foreign Ministry, Federal Security Service (FSB) and National Guard have been instructed to take measures to ensure the decree’s implementation,” TASS, a Kremlin-run media outlet, reported Wednesday.
The Russian leader has a history of issuing passports ahead of a military operation. Russia granted passports to thousands of Georgian citizens in the years before its 2008 war with Georgia, when Russia intervened to help separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia thwart the Georgian military. The Russian government justified the intervention as a step to protect Russian citizens from the Georgian government, citing the high number of Russian passport holders. That conflict ended with Georgia’s military defeat, followed by South Ossetia and Abkhazia declaring independence, backed by Russia.
International efforts to broker an end to the Ukraine conflict produced a pair of ceasefire agreements struck in Belarus, but they’ve never been implemented and the two sides have dug in.
Ortagus said Wednesday that Ukrainian president-elect Volodymyr Zelensky “has repeatedly expressed his readiness to engage seriously with Russia to implement the Minsk agreements, and to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine, which has claimed some 13,000 lives. It is now up to Russia to decide whether it wants to continue to escalate tensions or meet its Minsk commitments.”
