Some Notes on Passportization
In this article, I’d like to write a bit about how the weaponization of passports and citizenship as a tool of Russian conquest and colonization in Ukraine, a phenomenon commonly referred to as “passportization.” Russia’s passportization program in Ukraine is not new; however, it has arguably assumed particular significance since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022. Numerous reports, for example, have emerged that make clear that occupation authorities have consistently sought to compel Ukrainians, using various mechanisms, to accept Russian citizenship in return for access to basic necessities, including access to pensions, humanitarian aid, to avoid deportation, to maintain employment, or even to keep their children.
Moreover, since 2022, passportization has arguably been used as tool in a broader colonial strategy, masquerading as a voluntary, legal process, intended both to deprive Ukraine of its citizens as well as to reify Moscow’s illegitimate claims over occupied territories.
The fact that passportization has been occurring in occupied territories since 2014 is not a secret, of course. However, my analysis approaches the topic from a political-geographical perspective, rather than simply a political, administrative, legal, or material one, so I want to take a moment to explain where I’m coming from, here. While I will base my analysis here in part upon my previous academic research on passportization, I promise not to get too far into the weeds.
My previous work on the subject focused on Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two so-called “de facto” states in Georgia. In the wake of that country’s tragic civil war in 1993/4, Russia established ostensible “peacekeeping missions” in those regions, which, in a now-familiar pattern, was intended to “freeze” the conflicts there.
The 2003 Rose Revolution, however, threatened to upset the status quo, which had ensured that Tbilisi remained largely compliant towards Moscow. Mikheil Saakashvili’s ambitions to reestablish full control over over Georgia’s internationally recognized borders — a project that would have entailed modifying or abolishing the quasi-independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia — threatened to undermine a key source of Russian leverage.
Importantly, along with increasing its military and political support for the de facto governments in Sokhumi and Tskhinvali in the years leading up to the 2008 war, Moscow also rapidly expanded the issuing of passports to Abkhazians and South Ossetians, who did not need to be coerced into becoming Russian citizens. As I wrote:
Most of the non- ethnically Georgian residents of South Ossetia and Abkhazia were quite eager to become Russian citizens. In part, this was because number of benefits accrued to those naturalized. Such benefits included access to jobs in Russia, greater freedom to travel, and the ability to claim Russian state pensions that were in many cases significantly more generous than the pensions offered by the Georgian government. Russian passports also opened up the possibility of closer ties between Abkhazians and South Ossetians and coethnics living in Adygea and North Ossetia, respectively.
Passportisation, unlike the provision of armaments, fundamentally transformed the quality of Russia’s engagement in Georgia. Henceforth, Russia’s stake would be much more immediate and, quite literally, more personal. [emphasis added]
Although Moscow’s statements presented all of this as an uncontroversial process merely carried out “in accordance with the legislation of the Russian Federation,” it in fact established a putatively “legal” basis for future military intervention. This is because Russia has long reserved the right to intervene in neighboring countries in order to “protect” its “compatriots abroad,” an extremely broad category that includes Russian citizens; people who have “made a free choice in favor of spiritual, cultural and legal ties with the Russian Federation”; stateless people with ties to Russia or the former Soviet Union; and so forth.
In the end, this scenario is exactly what transpired in August 2008: as fighting broke out between Georgia and the de facto regime in South Ossetia, Russia launched a massive invasion employing forces that were, conveniently, still positioned near the Russia-Georgia border after the “Kavkaz 2008” military exercises two weeks earlier. Moscow justified the invasion on the grounds that it was intervening to stop a “genocide” being perpetrated against Russian citizens. These newly-minted citizens, of course, had been deliberately manufactured through passportization.
Ultimately, the distribution of Russian citizenship constituted one element of a broader strategy that was meant to blur the lines surrounding the notion of territorial integrity, essentially giving Moscow de facto (though not de jure) control over South Ossetia and Abkhazia:
By conferring citizenship en masse to the residents of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Russia discursively extended its sovereignty into territory legally owned by another state…a Russian passport was an unambiguous sign that Moscow’s writ — and its military might — extended at least as far as to the soil upon which its bearer stood.
In other words, by manufacturing citizens whom reserved the right to intervene and “protect,” Russia created political/territorial/legal grey zones in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Previously, these regions had certainly been politically oriented towards Moscow and relied on the presence of Russian peacekeepers for protection, but passportization essentially made them and their populations de facto part of Russia, despite the fact that international law recognized them (as it continues to do today) as parts of the sovereign territory of Georgia.
So what does this all have to do with what is happening in Ukraine? Well, quite a lot, actually.
My previous work on passportization interpreted the process primarily through the lens of security — a discourse that Russia has of course also employed vis-a-vis its nearly decade-long war against Ukraine — as well as a revanchist desire to reassert hegemony over the so-called “post-Soviet space.” I don’t think that this interpretation is necessarily wrong, but I do think that it is incomplete. In particular, I was not as perceptive as I ought to have been regarding the specifically colonial aspects of passportization, which I will discuss later.
Russia was distributing passports in Ukraine for years before its full-scale invasion in 2022: according to one estimate, by the middle of 2020, “more than 180,000 new citizens from the ‘People’s Republics’ had already been granted Russian citizenship”; by 2021, that number had ballooned to 527,000, facilitated by a simplified regime that allowed residents to obtain passports without having to travel to Russia. The numbers are even more striking in occupied Crimea where, “[w]ithin nine months of annexation [in 2014], Russia issued more than 1.5 million passports to residents.”
This process, of course, did not merely entail the reassignment of citizens from one state to another. Putin has (among numerous other things) sought to legitimate Russian aggression against Ukraine as a justifiable response to a non-existent “genocide” being perpetrated against “citizens of the Russian Federation.” As was the case in South Ossetia in 2008, that many of these citizens have been deliberately and purposefully manufactured by Russia itself is, of course, quietly elided.
That being the case — and I want to underscore this point — it is crucial to understand that Russian passportization in Ukraine has never simply been intended to support the fabrication of some flimsy pretext for armed aggression: its goals and its underlying logic are far more expansive. This is to say, in other words, to try and understand the ongoing process of passportization in the occupied territories as a pretext for creating a casus belli. Russia is, after all, already obviously and openly at war with Ukraine: it does not need a casus belli. Consequently, if we want to understand the significance of passportization in Ukraine today, we need to find other explanations.
As I wrote in 2014, not long before the annexation of Crimea:
Accepting a Russian passport signifies legal inclusion in the Russian body politic, with everything that that connotes. Distributing Russian passports on the territory of another sovereign state is therefore loaded with political, territorial and legal significance.
Indeed, according to the Associated Press, “when Ukrainians apply for a Russian passport, they must submit biometric data and cell phone information and swear an oath of loyalty.” This binds them and makes them legible, directly and indirectly, to the Russian state, not only through their “oaths” (however insincere), but also through the incorporation of their locations, contact information, and biological data into government databases. This helps to explain why occupation authorities have been so eager to open passport offices and form mobile registration teams whose job it is to increase the uptake of Russian citizenship in remote villages.
Passportization in the occupied territories also accelerated in the run-up to Russia’s recent presidential “elections,” whose foregone conclusion nevertheless required the performance of “democracy.” This was particularly important in places that were supposedly “liberated” by the Russian army: eager to demonstrate “popular support” for Moscow, occupation authorities actually violated Russia’s own election laws and “allowed” Ukrainian passport holders to vote.
This “waiver” was only intended as a stopgap measure, though, and passportization has continued apace: by the end of 2023 Russia had distributed over two million passports in the occupied territories; by March 2024, Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, reported that nearly 100% of the population remaining in occupied territories had become Russian citizens. This was facilitated by the distribution of “ready-made” passports, along with outright cash payments to “refugees” who have been driven out of their homes and subsequently offered Russian citizenship.
The penalties for refusal, however, are harsh: despite claims by Russian authorities that Ukrainians are “willingly” lining up to become citizens, in truth passportization is being employed as a coercive tool: those who decline are typically barred from accessing pensions, health care, and humanitarian aid, and may also face the loss of the right to drive, work, or even own property. Reports have even emerged indicating that Ukrainians have been denied access to food, water, and heating gas unless they hold a Russian passport. Other reports have indicated that “it has become mandatory for all teachers, doctors, police officers, and government officials to obtain Russian documents.”
From the point of view of the Russian government, moreover, Russian citizenship establishes a perverse “legal” basis for conscripting Ukrainians in occupied territories to join the Russian military to fight against Ukraine (which is unambiguously a war crime). These troops are often untrained and poorly equipped, essentially serving as “meat waves” to be thrown against Ukrainian positions. According to one observer, conscription notices are being delivered electronically and recipients have 7 days to respond, after which they will be considered criminals. In the words of a Ukrainian human rights lawyer, “For [the Russian government], it’s logical not to waste Russian people, just to use Ukrainians,” whose lives are viewed as expendable by the Russian state. Coercing Ukrainians into becoming Russian citizens and then drafting them to fight their own country, from this point of view, kills two birds with one stone.
Another aspect of passportization, and one that, as noted earlier, I myself was slow to recognize, is that it provides a thin veneer of “legality” to Moscow’s colonial ambitions. This is to say that the mass conferral of Russian citizenship in Ukraine is ultimately intended to reify the Russian state’s otherwise unsustainable claims that occupied territories are integral parts of the Russian Federation and that Ukrainians, ultimately, do not exist as a separate nation.
Mariupol is a case in point. Since 2022, thousands of “migrants” from Russia have flooded into Mariupol, reflecting Moscow’s ambition to “to create a completely new image of the city with modern apartment buildings and social facilities” amid the corpses of the city’s former inhabitants, many of whom were buried among the ruins of their homes. This ruined city is being colonized, physically and culturally, by Russia at a furious pace. As I noted in a previous essay:
Around 40,000 people have relocated to Mariupol…The shift in population is happening so fast that, if the city is not liberated, 80% of its population will be Russian within five years. [Emphasis added]
As Ukrainians disappear from the occupied territories — either because they have fled, been converted into “Russian citizens,” or simply murdered — the places they once inhabited are converted into grotesque necropolises, where Russian influencers, feeding their audiences’ hunger for the “Mariupol aesthetic,” pose for glamour shots in front of bombed out buildings and Russian clothing brands parade Stalin-themed fashions against the backdrop of dead cities and the stink of corpses.
Passportization plays a key role in this colonial enterprise.* According to one report, for example:
For residents of Mariupol, Russian passports have become essential, as they are needed to access local services, including to apply for compensation for their destroyed homes.
[…]
Russian media reports have shown grateful families moving into newly constructed apartment blocks, complete with playgrounds out front.Residents whose homes have been destroyed are supposedly eligible to join a waiting list for a new apartment if they have the documents to prove they owned the home and it is now uninhabitable.
However, according to one resident, “she felt forced to get a Russian passport because it is the only document accepted in the city.”
The reconstruction and colonization of Mariupol is also part of a strategy of russification and the effacement of Ukrainian identity and cultural memory more broadly. In addition to the influx of Russian migrants, city streets have been renamed in honor Russian and Soviet heroes; the ruble and replaced the hryvnia; the destruction of Ukrainian cultural sites (museums, libraries, monuments, etc.) has occurred wholesale; a russocentric educational curriculum has been mandated in schools; landmarks, such as the famous “Milana” mural that commemorated survivors of the Russian assault on the city in 2015 have been literally erased; and the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theatre in Mariupol which was infamously destroyed by Russian bombs in 2022 while serving as a shelter, was hastily rebuilt and repurposed to serve as a conduit for valorizing pro-Russian narratives:
The theatre is slated to start staging productions of Russian and Soviet classics by the start of next year, in a project that is part of what the Kremlin bills as its plan to revive Mariupol and what Ukraine sees as nothing more than an attempt to remake the ruins into a Russian city.
All of this, as Inna Polianska points out, represents a deliberate campaign to erase all traces of Ukrainian-ness from the cultural landscape of Mariupol:
The deliberate erasure of Ukrainian places of memory is one of the most productive Russian colonial strategies — and now it is actively used in the temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories. Through assimilation, neo-colonization, and the displacement of Ukrainian cultural symbols, Russia seeks to reshape Mariupol’s collective memory, obscuring the traumatic events of war crimes and promoting a narrative that aligns with its own imperial agenda. [Emphasis original]
The elimination of Ukrainian identity and statehood has been a fundamental goal of Russia’s war since the very beginning, a goal legitimated by Putin’s own theories about the supposed “historical unity” of Russians and Ukrainians that simply expect the latter to assimilate into the former and disappear.
Russia does not view Ukraine as a sovereign state, Ukrainians as a separate nation, or the Ukrainian language as anything except a corrupted dialect of Russian. Instruction in Russian has thus become mandatory in schools, in place of Ukrainian:
In claiming that all Russian speakers belong to Russia and Russian culture, Putin is using language as both a pretext and a tool of expansion. At the same time, he denies the existence of Ukraine as a state. He wants to downgrade Ukrainian to a Russian dialect because, according to his playbook, if there is no national language, there is no nation.
If the national consciousness of unwilling Ukrainians may take generation to fully russify, then the russification of their everyday lives — the replacement of what might be termed a “Ukrainian habitus” by a Russian one — can be achieved relatively swiftly. Passportization, I would argue, is an important piece of this process.
After all, at the most basic level, passports document a person’s belonging to a particular political community: is someone a citizen of Russia or of Ukraine? What are the ramifications of those different modes of belonging? Which rights, responsibilities, obligations, or damages accrue in either case? As we have already seen, possession of a Russian passport has become the only way that many people in occupied territories have access to basic life necessities, housing, work, and so forth. What this means is that peoples’ lives, both in a purely biological sense, but also as political subjects, hinges in some sense on “belonging” to Russia in a very real sense:
Russian occupation authorities are going to officially make Ukrainian citizens in the occupied territories “aliens.” That means that, if residents refuse to receive a Russian passport, they will need to apply for either a migration card, a residence permit, or a work permit with fingerprints in order to remain in their own homes.
Failure to comply could mean deportation. Furthermore, “[a] new Russian law stipulates that anyone in the occupied territories who does not have a Russian passport by July 1 [2024] is subject to imprisonment as a ‘foreign citizen.’”
In one particularly sinister development, women who give birth in occupied territories must, in order to simply keep their newborn children, be able to demonstrate that at least one parent holds Russian citizenship. The point, of course, is to coerce Ukrainians in occupied into becoming Russian citizens, their children likely to fill the ranks of a new generation of Russian citizens being inducted into Russia’s rapidly metastasizing death cult.
Consider, for example, that in the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics an entire generation of children has been born and/or raised in a fundamentally russocentric, anti-Ukrainian milieu since 2014. This means that a child born in, say, 2006 will have lived through many of their most formative years — in terms of the formation of basic beliefs and worldview, politics, identity, culture, habitus, and so forth — both severed from the country and the national community into which they were born, and, in fact, raised to view that country as fundamentally alien and hostile— a country of “Nazis” and “invaders.”
Not only are Ukrainians thus coerced into accepting Russian passports simply to be able to access housing and other basic necessities, or to merely keep their own children, but they must also consciously reject their own identities and become Russian citizens or otherwise risk becoming “foreigners” in their own land. Unfortunately, as Oleksandr Polianchev grimly points out, even if they do become Russian citizens, they will forever life with an indelible stigma:
[Russia’s] major challenge is an “enemy” group whose very existence is believed to be a result of a global conspiracy intended to destroy the national body — the Ukrainians. Recasting them into the inferior kind of Russians and eliminating those unfit or unwilling to become ones is the main goal.even those Ukrainians who will agree to be “ethno-politically rehabilitated” (an ominous official euphemism) into Russians will forever remain suspects, with all that it entails.
Other people, moreover, having been pressured into accepting Russian citizenship for any of the reasons mentioned above, may, after liberation, struggle to reintegrate due to a number of factors, including simply the loss or destruction of their Ukrainian documents, which would be needed to establish their Ukrainian citizenship. Although the Ukrainian government has advised Ukrainians to accept Russian citizenship to protect their own safety, the sad reality is that reintegration after liberation is likely to be a difficult and painful process for many.
Passportization thus entails the social, political, legal, and discursive stripping away of a person’s connection to Ukrainian national or political life and being claimed by the Russian state and assimilated into the constellation of “russianness” and the “Russian world.” In addition to the devastation caused by the war itself, the intellectual and cultural devastation to residents of occupied territories may take generations to rectify; and many will never accept Ukraine as their own, or, having become effectively, “denationalized,” be accepted.
Viewed in this light, passportization should be understood not merely as a political technology, but also as a colonial strategy whose purpose is to sever the cultural, historical, political and territorial connections between the populations of occupied territories and their own country. Moreover, it is being used to discipline a largely unwilling and resistant subject population and to force it to integrate into the Russian political system and hasten the political and cultural russification of occupied territories, largely against the will of the people who live there.
There is a lot more that could be said about passportization, of course, but my purpose here is not to be exhaustive. My main goal is to shed light on an aspect of this war that I think is over examined somewhat superficially, and one that is usually overshadowed by the grim realities of Russia’s staggering crimes or other, more strictly military, matters.
However, I do think that the political, geographical, and cultural dynamics embedded in the process of passportization, set in motion by decrees from Moscow and carried out in the bureaus and offices of occupation authorities, deserve more scrutiny. Forcibly changing people’s citizenship is, first and foremost, a violation of human rights. Moreover, as I hope I have demonstrated here, it does not merely carry with it the kinds of material consequences that have been variously reported upon: crucially, it is also a fundamental part of Russia’s colonial and genocidal toolkit, one designed and implemented, to facilitate territorial conquest, russification, and the erasure of Ukrainian identity and, ultimately, Ukrainians themselves.
* Further indicating the essentially colonial nature of the reconstruction of Mariupol, thousands of Central Asian guest workers, have been hired by Russian construction firms to help rebuild the city. Arguably, this reflects Moscow’s attitude towards what it regards as its “Near Abroad,” a supposedly privileged sphere of influence (by dint of its historical connections to the Russian and Soviet empires) in which Moscow continues to play the role of the imperial metropole.
As Russia carries out a war of aggression against one former colony, Ukraine, it exploits precarious migrant labor from other former colonies like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Tellingly, many Central Asian migrants in Mariupol, who frequently live in poor conditions and face xenophobia and legal discrimination in Russia, report that they are not even being paid, while others are dragooned into the Russian military.
Passports and citizenship play a role here as well: Central Asian migrants, eager to find work and send remittances to their families back home, are often enticed by the opportunity to take Russian citizenship, which has become easier to obtain since rules were relaxed in recent years. Putin, moreover, hoping to lure even more people, has made Russian citizenship even easier to obtain for those who serve in the military. Meanwhile, some Russian officials are proposing to strip the citizenship of migrants who do not fight in Ukraine.
