Agencies-Gaza post
Over 800 people in Ukraine acquire Russian citizenship
Russia began distributing Russian passports on Saturday in parts of the “Zaporizhia” region controlled by Russian forces.
Vladimir Rogoff said in a press release that passport holders would be thought Russian citizens in every sense of the word.
More than 70 thousand people had involved in the region.
At least 800 thousand people in the separatist regions of eastern Ukraine have acquired Russian citizenship, through a simplified process, over the past three years, according to the Russian news agency TASS.
The Russian Interior Ministry said that the Russian agency said that only 1% of applications from the citizens of the People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk had been abandoned.
In 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a decree facilitating the distribution of passports to people in the Donbas region.
Passports will also be distributed in provinces occupied by Russian forces since the start of the war last February. The Russian ruble will be rolled out as a means of payment.
The Ukrainian authorities accuse the occupying forces of forcing residents to acquire Russian citizenship and fear annexation of the occupied provinces.
Meanwhile, Kyiv documented that around 10 thousand Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since the start of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in late February, according to presidential adviser Alexei Aristovich.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine provided detailed information on the number of soldiers killed on both sides.
