Nearly 170,000 citizens of Ukraine received Russian citizenship, while about 350 Ukrainians got refugee status in the Russian Federation from 2014 until 2016, First Deputy Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s representative in the humanitarian subgroup of the trilateral contact group Iryna Gerashchenko said.
“Together with the Foreign Ministry of Ukraine, we have managed to press for and get information regarding citizens of Ukraine who have acquired Russian citizenship and refugee status,” she wrote on her Facebook page on Jan. 18.
According to the note from the Russian Foreign Ministry, in the period from 2014 to 2016, nearly 170,000 Ukrainians received Russian citizenship. In particular, Russian citizenship was granted to 24,141 people in 2014, 67,400 in 2015, and 75,497 in the first nine months of 2016.
“Unfortunately, we were not given any information on how many of these people come from the occupied Donbas, and it is obvious that the vast majority of these citizens are Crimean residents who are massively given Russian citizenship. Now we will demand the information on how many of these new Russian citizens are Crimean and how many of them are pensioners,” Gerashchenko wrote.
“As for the refugees, about 350 Ukrainians received this status in the Russian Federation over 2.5 years of war, in particular, 240 people in 2014, 84 people in 2015, and 31 people in 2016,” she added.
