On March 16, the separatist leaders of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) began issuing their own passports in eastern Ukraine. The territory’s militant leader Aleksander Zakharchenko called the move “a very important step toward building statehood” that will serve to solidify and formalize the territory’s separatist status. Earlier, Moscow had planned to hand out Russian passports to the so-called republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, and the strategy of launching local DNR passports complements this aim.Previously, Russia used policies of “passportization,” or the systematic distribution of Russian citizenship to Russian speakers or other separatist-inclined minorities residing in Abkhazia, Crimea, South …read more
Source: Atlantic Council
