Russia is using its army to try to take more of Ukraine. It’s using its passports to control the population

For more than three years, every time 67-year-old Iryna and her husband stepped beyond their front door, the Ukrainian couple feared for their lives.

They could be caught up in shelling or in a drone strike — or end up being interrogated by security agents at gunpoint as they tried to cross a checkpoint in the southern part of Kherson region, an area still under Russian control. 

The couple, who had been living under occupation since the early days of Russia’s invasion, initially refused to get a Russian passport even as Moscow made it increasingly difficult to survive without them. 

“Everything was becoming harder and harder,” said Iryna during an interview with CBC News last month. “You felt like you were in a cage.”

Iryna, who CBC News agreed to identify only by her first name due to her concerns about retribution from Russia, said she and her husband felt they had no choice but to get Russian passports last year. That was when the local stores closed and it became impossible to get groceries without going through a Russian checkpoint. 

Like many other Ukrainians, she and her husband accepted Russian citizenship because they feared what would happen if they didn’t. 

Mass distribution of passports

It is part of what human rights experts see as a widespread campaign of coercion that’s designed to extend Moscow’s influence over the occupied territories, areas it demands Ukraine relinquish as part of any potential peace deal. 

At the same time, the Kremlin has refused to implement a 30-day ceasefire, and Russian forces have recently launched a new offensive to try and take more Ukrainian land. 

According to Moscow, 3.5 million residents living in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson have received passports.

While Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the country had “virtually completed” the mass issuance of passports in these areas, he signed a presidential decree in March to target the few Ukrainians still holding out. 

Ukrainians who live in Russia, or the areas it purports to control, have to legalize their status by Sept. 10 — or leave their homes. 

Though these Ukrainian regions aren’t fully controlled by Russia, Moscow attempted to justify its claim to them by staging “sham” referendums in September 2022 that were condemned by world leaders. 

Its passport policy is an extension of that strategy, considered an attempt to weaken Ukrainian sovereignty and a clear sign that Moscow has no intention of giving up the territory it now occupies. 

Russia has previously used its fast-track passport scheme as a geopolitical tool in other areas, including in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia and in Moldova’s separatist Transdniestria region.

After Russia illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014, it distributed Russian passports in a widespread campaign. 

Life under occupation

At the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Iryna and her husband were living in a cottage on an island in the Dnipro River Delta in the Kherson region. 

The area was seized by Russia during the first week of the war. 

When Ukrainian forces retook part of Kherson, including Kherson City in November 2022, Iryna said Russia’s soldiers ordered her and other residents to evacuate further south.

She and her husband ended up living in someone else’s house in the village of Stara Zbur’ivka, located along the south side of the Dnipro river.

They tried to avoid interacting with the Russian soldiers, Iryna told CBC News, but having to cross a Russian checkpoint each time they needed groceries or supplies meant they would be grilled by those manning it. 

“They kept asking ‘Why are you not taking a passport, are you waiting for the Ukrainian military to return?'” said Iryna.

On one occasion, she said, a soldier pointed a gun at her husband’s head while questioning him. 

“It was no longer possible without them,” she said of getting a Russian passport. “It was just dangerous.”

When Iryna and her husband decided to leave Kherson in March, they used their Russian passports as they travelled into Crimea and then Russia. At that point, she said, a local underground network of volunteers helped them get back to Ukraine by going through Belarus. 

Now living in Dnipro, the couple said they have no use for the passports Russia imposed on them. 

Passport policy

Even before Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Moscow was trying to entice Ukrainians with citizenship. 

Putin signed a decree speeding up the process for those living in the self-proclaimed regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, which were then controlled by Russian-backed separatists. 

By July 2022, the Kremlin announced that all Ukrainian citizens were eligible to receive passports under the fast-track scheme. 

According to Human Rights Watch, the passports were distributed through an illegal pressure campaign, in which Russian authorities threatened to detain Ukrainian citizens or confiscate property if they didn’t accept a passport.

Russia has made it increasingly impossible to live without the document in the territory it occupies, requiring it to access state services, including pension payments, education and health care. 

During a six-month period in 2023, the international organization Physicians for Human Rights documented at least 15 cases of people being denied medical care, because they lived in the occupied territories and didn’t have a Russian passport. 

The group said some hospitals even set up a desk so desperate patients could fill out the necessary paperwork right there. 

Advising Ukrainian citizens

Ivan, a co-ordinator with the Yellow Ribbon resistance campaign that’s active in the occupied territories, told CBC News that through 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 identify him by his last name, given his work in the occupied territories and the possibility of retribution by Russian authorities.

In 2023, the resistance group ran an information campaign about steps Ukrainian citizens could take to prevent their flats or other real estate from being confiscated if they didn’t have Russian citizenship. 

But he said as Russia ramped up restrictions, the messaging changed. 

“We are recommending that people take a Russian passport because you basically need it if you want to survive,” he said during a Zoom interview in April. “You could be arrested or detained … just because you don’t have it.”

While he and others try to reassure residents that getting a passport is “no big deal” and they can later relinquish their Russian citizenship, he acknowledges that it could mean that men who are new citizens could be drafted into the country’s military.

Ivan, who graduated from university in information technology in 2021, was living in Kherson City when it was invaded by Russia. At the time, he had lost his Ukrainian passport, so he ended up being issued a Russian legal document.

After the liberation of Kherson City, Ivan went to the northern part of the country, before later taking a route through Russia to enter the Russian-occupied part of the Ukrainian territory of Zaporizhzhia. 

He told CBC News he had relatives living in the area that he needed to bring passports to, and he helped a few local activists there stage non-violent resistance campaigns by tying yellow ribbons to trees and distributing information pamphlets. 

But he acknowledges he only knows of a few people in the occupied areas who haven’t yet taken a Russian passport. 

“Even they know that they will have to accept a passport if the occupation continues.”