For more than three years, every time Erina, 67, and her husband, fell beyond their front door, the Ukrainian couple fears for their lives.
They can be arrested in the bombing or a drone – or they end up interrogating by security agents at gunpoint while trying to cross a checkpoint in the southern part of the Jeresson region, an area still under Russian control.
The couple, who were living under occupation from the first days of Russia’s invasion of Russia, refused to obtain a Russian passport even when Moscow made it difficult to stay without them.
“Everything has become more difficult and difficult,” Irina said in an interview with CBC News last month. “I felt you were in a cage.”
Irina, who agreed to define her first name only because of her fears about revenge on Russia, said that she and her husband felt that they had no choice but to obtain Russian passports last year. It was when I closed the local stores and became impossible to get groceries without passing through a Russian checkpoint.
Like many other Ukrainians, she and her Russian sexual husband accepted that they fear what will happen if they did not.
Collective distribution of passports
It is part of what human rights experts see as a wide campaign of coercion designed to expand the impact of Moscow on the occupied territories, and it is the areas that require Ukraine to give up any possible peace deal.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin refused to carry out a 30 -day ceasefire, and Russian forces recently launched a new attack to try to take more Ukrainian lands.
According to Moscow, 3.5 million people lived in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzia and Kheson passports.
While Russian President Vladimir Putin said the country “has already completed” the public passports in these areas, he signed a presidential decree in March to target the few Ukrainian who still hold.
The Ukrainians who live in Russia, or the areas it claims to control, must legalize their status by September 10 – or leave their homes.
Although these Ukrainian regions are not fully controlled by Russia, Moscow tried to justify its demand for organization “Sham” Referendums in September 2022 condemned by world leaders.
Its passport policy is an extension of that strategy, which is an attempt to weaken Ukrainian sovereignty and a clear indication that Moscow has no intention to abandon the lands it occupies now.
Russia has previously used the rapid passport plan as a geopolitical tool in other areas, including in Differential areas From Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia and in the separatist Trancesteria region in Moldova.
After illegally included Russia in the Crimea in 2014, Russian passports were distributed in a large -scale campaign.
Life is under occupation
At the beginning of Russia’s extensive invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Arena and her husband lived in a hut on an island in the Delta of the Denbero River in the Jeresson region.
The region was seized by Russia during the first week of the war.
when Ukrainian forces recovered Part of Jupson, including the city of Jiusson in November 2022, Eralina said that Russian soldiers had ordered them and other residents to evacuate south.
She and her husband ended up living in the house of another person in the village of Stara Zbur’ivka, located along the southern side of the Dnipro River.
They tried to avoid interacting with Russian soldiers, as Irina CBC News told, but having to cross a Russian checkpoint every time they need groceries or supplies means that they will roast them by those who run them.
Irina said: “They kept asking,” Why don’t you take a passport, are you waiting for the Ukrainian army to return? “
She said once, a soldier directed a pistol at the head of her husband while interrogating him.
She said about a Russian passport: “This is no longer possible without them.” “It was dangerous.”
When Erina and her husband decided to leave Jesson in March, they used their Russian passports while traveling to the Crimea and then Russia. At that point, she said that a local volunteer network of volunteers helped them return to Ukraine by passing through Belarus.
Now they live in Dnipro, the couple said they have no benefit to the passports imposed by Russia.
Passport policy
Even before Russia launched its invasion on a large scale, Moscow was trying to lure the Ukrainians with citizenship.
Putin Decree Accelerating the process of those who live in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, which was self -controlled, which was then controlled by Russian -backed separatists.
By July 2022, the Kremlin announced that all Ukrainian citizens They were qualified to receive passports Under the fast track scheme.
According to Hummway Watch, passports were distributed through Illegal pressure campaignWhere the Russian authorities threatened to detain Ukrainian citizens or confiscate property if they did not accept a passport.
Russia has made it increasingly impossible to live without the document in its region, which requires access to state services, including pension payments, education and health care.
During a six -month period in 2023, doctors of the International Organization for Human Rights documented at least 15 cases of people who were rejected for medical care, because they lived in the occupied territories and had no Russian passport.
The group said that some hospitals have created an office so that the desperate patients can fill the necessary papers there.
Providing advice to Ukrainian citizens
Evan, a coordinator with a campaign to resist the yellow tape that is active in the occupied territories, told CBC News that during the first few years of the Russian invasion, he and other volunteers advised residents about how to avoid accepting a Russian passport.
CBC News agreed not to be recognized by his last name, given his work in the occupied territories and the possibility of revenge by the Russian authorities.
In 2023, the Resistance Group has managed an information campaign about the steps that Ukrainian citizens can take to prevent their apartments or other real estate from their sources if they do not have Russian citizenship.
But he said while Russia was intensifying restrictions, the correspondence changed.
“We advise people to take a Russian passport because you need it mainly if you want to survive,” he said during an interview with takbeer in April. “You can be caught or detained … just because you do not have it. “
While he and others try to reassure the residents that obtaining a passport “no big deal”, and later they can abandon their Russian nationality, he admits that it may mean that men who are new citizens can be formulated in the country’s army.
Ivan, who graduated from a university in information technology in 2021, lived in the city of Jupson when he invaded Russia. At that time, he lost his Ukrainian passport, so he ended up with a Russian legal document.
After liberating the city of Jupson, Ivan went to the northern part of the country, before he later walking through Russia to enter the part that the Russian occupies from the Ukrainian lands in Zaborisia.
He told CBC News that he had relatives living in the area that he needed to bring passports to it, and a few local activists there helped there unnoticed resistance campaigns by linking the yellow tapes to trees and distributing the information author.
But he admits that he knows only a few people in the occupied areas who have not yet obtained a Russian passport.
“They even know that they will have to accept a passport if the occupation continues.”
https://i.cbc.ca/1.7547930.1748611030!/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/16x9_1180/1242288417.jpg?im=Resize%3D620
Source link