From 11 September 2025 Ukrainians who have not taken Russian citizenship can be forcibly deported from their own homeland. Three and a half years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the aggressor state is claiming that Ukrainian nationals without Russian passports are ‘foreign’ and subject to expulsion. Judging by an occupation ‘police’ message on 10 September, deportations may well be imminent.
As reported, the deadline of 10 September 2025 was set in an extraordinarily cynical ‘decree’ from 20 March 2025, issued by Russian leader Vladimir Putin. This asserted that “Ukrainian citizens in the Russian Federation [sic!] without lawful grounds for being (living) in the Russian Federation are obliged to themselves leave the Russian Federation or by the end of 10 September 2025 regulate their legal position in the Russian Federation” (in accordance with an earlier decree from 30 December 2024). Putin can repeat ‘Russian Federation’ as many times as he likes. It will not make Russia’s violent seizure of Ukrainian territory and claim to have made it part of its federation any more real.
Although Russia soon made it next to impossible to live in occupied Crimea without taking Russian passports, it was only in fairly isolated cases that Crimeans were either deported or banned from returning from mainland Ukraine. Since the full-scale invasion in 2022, Russian methods have been far more aggressive. Within little more than a year of its invasion, Russia was denying people on occupied territory vital medication, including life-saving insulin, if they did not have Russian citizenship. Nor could you receive pensions or other social benefits.
Some of the methods of coercion were not necessarily only linked with citizenship. The first threats that children would be forcibly taken from their parents and placed in children’s homes emerged because parents in occupied parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts were avoiding sending their children to Russian occupation ‘schools’ to be brainwashed. Later this proved to be another method for foisting Russian citizenship as children could not be enrolled unless at least one parent had a Russian passport.
Other levers have included the threat that people will be stripped of their property rights to their own homes or that they will be dismissed from their jobs, etc.
In reporting the likely deportations from 11 September, Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation pointed out that “Enforced passportisation is a method for the Kremlin to create an illusion of “legality” for Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory. And the repression with which Ukrainian citizens are driven into taking Russian citizenship is an instrument for eradicating any demonstrations of disloyalty to the invaders”.
Russia’s brazenness in calling Ukrainians ‘foreign nationals’ and deporting them from Ukrainian territory may well have been exacerbated by the resistance it has encountered, particularly, although not only in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. If Putin & Co. genuinely believed in February 2022 that they could seize control in Kyiv within three days and that the population would welcome the invaders, they badly miscalculated. The aggressive nature of the coercion makes it clear that they know they failed and will not forgive Ukrainians. There is, in fact, evidence in a lot of areas that have fallen under Russian occupation that the Russians prefer to bring in other Russians both to work and to settle. The aim would seem to be to change the ethnic makeup of occupied territory, get rid of ‘pesky Ukrainians’ who don’t welcome invaders on tanks as they should. Russia doubtless hopes to conceal these deliberate attempts at changing the demographic makeup of occupied territory by flooding such territory with new ‘Russians by force’. Russia may well see this as an opportunity to purge occupied territory of Ukrainians who have withstood heavy pressure, threats and coercion and not taken Russian citizenship. Such pro-Ukrainian dissidence can already get a person abducted, tortured and, sometimes, sentenced to long terms of imprisonment on fabricated spying charges. Now it will also get you deported from your own country.
