New law brings Russia closer to mobilizing Ukrainians on occupied territory to fight against Ukraine

Russian leader Vladimir Putin has signed a law, making it possible to deprive people of Russian citizenship if they fail to register for military service.  The amendments, passed on 8 August 2024 to Russia’s laws on military service and on citizenship confirm fears that Russia’s aggressive measures to force its citizenship on Ukrainians in occupied territory were prompted by Moscow’s plans to forcibly mobilize Ukrainian men to fight its war of aggression against Ukraine.  

The law is specifically about those who have taken Russian citizenship and is clearly directed against Ukrainian men living on occupied territory.  Russia is deploying an arsenal of weapons to foist its citizenship, including stripping those without Russian citizenship of their property rights, denying healthcare, even the issue of insulin and other vital medication, threatening to take people’s children away and others.  Having made it next to impossible to live on occupied territory without Russian citizenship, it is now using the threat of losing this as a way of tracking down all males whom Moscow will then be able to force to fight against their compatriots.   The law will also be used as pressure against the many economic migrants from former Soviet Central Asian republics who had believed that Russian citizenship would give them security and now find they are being forced into Russia’s army.

The bill also sets out other grounds for being stripped of obtained citizenship, however these are either obvious (providing false information in applying) or apply to situations where losing Russian citizenship would be the least of a person’s problems.  It can be removed if a person is claimed to have committed, or merely “planned to commit” a crime, or if they are alleged to have committed “actions posing a threat to Russia’s national security”.  The latter is notoriously vague and could be used about a huge range of activities that are entirely legal in a law-based, democratic country.  With respect to the ‘crimes’, ‘attempted crimes’ and ‘planned crimes’, Russia is violating international law by applying its legislation on occupied territory.  It has also criminalized several religious movements and used corresponding legislation to imprison civic activists, journalists or anyone targeted for pro-Ukrainian views.  In occupied Crimea, Russia has then used the fact that its victims were forced to take Russian citizenship as a weapon, making it significantly harder to secure such political prisoners’ release.

It should be said that Russia is just as willing to use the law as a weapon, as it is to ignore the lack of any law or grounds for mobilization.  Immediately after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, for example, the occupation regime in the Russian proxy ‘Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics’ began forcibly rounding up any men they could find, regardless of their age, state of health and citizenship.  Men were grabbed at work or off the streets and, within a week or two, sent to the front where they were effectively abandoned by their commanders without any food or water.  Huge numbers are likely to have died, with Russia clearly preferring to send Donbas men since their deaths did not need to be recorded, or their families paid ‘’compensation’.

As of July 2023, Ukraine’s Military Intelligence was reporting that 55-60 thousand Ukrainian men were likely to have been forcibly mobilized.

It was clear from September 2022 that a major reason for Russia’s fake ‘referendum’ on occupied parts of Donetsk; Luhansk; Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts was to claim that the occupied territory and its citizens had ‘become Russian’ with this opening the possibility of forcibly mobilizing a huge number of Ukrainians. 

In late December 2023, the Mariupol City Council posted an ‘instruction’ from a so-called ‘Donetsk people’s republic district educational department’ to place students born in 2007 on the military register, with all such 17-year-olds to be forced, from January 2024, to register at the Russian occupation military recruitment office and thus be in danger of open or covert mobilization into Russia’s army.  It is a war crime to force people on occupied territory to serve in the invading state’s army, yet Russia began conscripting Ukrainians in occupied Crimea soon after its invasion in 2014, and is continuing. 

Nor is Russia’s claim that conscripts are not sent into battle to be believed, and never was.  There was evidence back in 2014-15 that young conscripts in Russia were being forced to sign contracts to serve in the army.  The same is almost certainly still happening, with at least 159 conscripts already known to have been killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.  Unless Russia is defeated, it is only a matter of time before Ukrainians from all occupied territory face forced mobilization or at least conscription into the enemy army.