Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered Ukrainians living under Russian occupation to “legalize” their status by September 10 or face deportation. In other words, those who have not yet done so must apply for Russian passports or risk being expelled from their homes as foreigners. The presidential decree, issued on March 20, is the latest step in a campaign to pressure Ukrainians to accept Russian citizenship as the Kremlin seeks to tighten its grip on parts of Ukraine currently under Russian control.
Kremlin officials say they have distributed some 3.5 million Russian passports in Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion just over three years ago. Residents are reportedly being forced to apply for Russian passports to access basic services such as healthcare and state pensions, while those without Russian documents face the possibility of persecution and detention.
Forced Russian citizenship is just one of many tools used by the Kremlin to systematically erase all traces of Ukrainian statehood and national identity throughout Russian-occupied Ukraine. Wherever Russian troops advance, local populations are subjected to mass arrests designed to root out any potential dissenters. Elected officials, military veterans, religious leaders, civil society activists, teachers, journalists, and patriots are commonly targeted. Thousands have been abducted in this way since 2022 and remain missing, with many believed to be languishing in a network of prisons in Russian-occupied Ukraine and in Russia itself.
Those who remain are subjected to terror tactics in what Britain's The Economist described as a “totalitarian hell.” All public symbols of Ukrainian statehood and cultural identity are systematically dismantled. The Ukrainian language is suppressed, and any Christian denomination other than the Russian Orthodox Church is subject to persecution or worse.
Moscow’s efforts to erase Ukrainian identity begin in the classroom. In schools across the occupied regions, Ukrainian children are taught a new Kremlin-approved curriculum that praises Russian imperialism and glorifies the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, while demonizing the entire concept of a separate and independent Ukrainian state. Any parents who dare resist risk losing custody of their children.
The Kremlin is also accused of kidnapping tens of thousands of Ukrainian children from occupied regions and deporting them to Russia, where they are subjected to ideological indoctrination to strip them of their Ukrainian roots and impose an imperial Russian identity. In March 2023, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Putin for his personal involvement in these mass kidnappings of Ukrainian children.
The actions of the Russian occupation authorities are entirely consistent with the vicious anti-Ukrainian rhetoric emanating from Putin himself and other officials in Moscow. Putin has long insisted that Ukrainians are in fact Russians (“one people”). Six months before the full-scale invasion, he took the highly unusual step of publishing a lengthy historical essay that sounded like a declaration of war on Ukrainian statehood.
As Russian forces prepared to invade in February 2022, Putin sought to justify the act of international aggression by describing Ukraine as “an integral part of our own history, culture and spiritual space.” He has since compared his invasion to the imperial conquests of Russian Tsar Peter the Great in the 18th century and declared the occupied Ukrainian territory “Russian forever.”
The Russian establishment has enthusiastically followed Putin’s lead. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev declared that “Ukraine’s existence is mortally dangerous for Ukrainians,” while Putin’s top aide Nikolai Patrushev recently suggested that Ukraine might soon “cease to exist.” Meanwhile, vitriolic anti-Ukrainian language has become so common in Kremlin-controlled Russian media that UN investigators believe it may constitute “incitement to genocide.”
This week’s presidential decree threatening to deport Ukrainians from their homes is the latest reminder that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not just a border dispute or an attempt to resolve legitimate security concerns. It is a colonial war of the most brutal kind, aimed at destroying Ukraine as a state and a nation. In the heart of Europe, and before the eyes of the world, Putin is openly pursuing a policy that almost certainly meets the definition of ethnic cleansing and may qualify as genocide.
The grim reality of the Russian invasion must weigh heavily on American officials now busy drawing lines on maps and trying to create a realistic framework for a possible cease-fire agreement between Russia and Ukraine. While diplomatic compromises and temporary territorial concessions are now clearly inevitable, any future peace agreement must also take into account the fate of the millions of Ukrainians who will likely remain under Russian occupation.
Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council's UkraineAlert service.
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