Moscow has started issuing Russian citizenship to Ukrainians remaining in the destroyed Donetsk city of Avdiivka following Kyiv’s retreat from the strategic settlement, according to Ukrainian media.
The first Ukrainian residents of Avdiivka have “received Russian Federation citizenship,” said Dmytro Shevchenko, the Moscow-installed official heading up the Donetsk city of Yasynuvata, just east of Avdiivka, according to Ukrainian outlet Ukrainska Pravda.
Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Foreign Ministry for comment via email.
Ukraine pulled its troops from Avdiivka after more than four months of bitter fighting earlier this month. Russia had been slowly advancing around the small city since October, but Ukraine had managed to keep a vital supply route from the west of Avdiivka in play.
“Our soldiers honorably fulfilled their military duty, did everything possible to destroy the best Russian military units, [and] inflicted significant losses on the enemy in manpower and equipment,” Ukraine’s army chief, Colonel General Oleksandr Syrsky, said in a statement.
DAMIEN MEYER/AFP via Getty Images
The withdrawal of Ukrainian troops was a significant blow to Kyiv just ahead of the second anniversary of all-out war in the country. Capturing Avdiivka was a strategic and symbolic victory for Moscow, Russian troops raising flags in the former Ukrainian stronghold that weathered a decade on the frontlines.
Avdiivka had a pre-war popular population of approximately 30,000 residents, but the vast majority were evacuated from the settlement before Ukrainian troops pulled back from Avdiivka. In the weeks leading up to the fall of Avdiivka, the city’s mayor, Vitaliy Barabash, said around 940 residents remained in the settlement.
But hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers are thought to have been left behind during Ukraine’s retreat from Avdiivka.
Experts and Ukrainian officials have frequently described methods of “Russification” of Ukrainians living in Moscow-controlled territories, including offering or forcing Russian citizenship on Ukrainian residents.
In November 2023, an investigation by several Western media networks found Ukrainians could not access services like healthcare without accepting Russian citizenship.
“Pensions are not provided without Russian passports, food is not provided without Russian passports, and medical services are out of the question,” one Ukrainian refugee, named as Larysa, told the European Broadcasting Union.
“Russian authorities coerce occupied populations to accept Russian passports by conditioning essential healthcare and other services on the possession of such passports,” the U.S.-based think tank, the Institute for the Study of War, said earlier this month.
“The Kremlin uses this forced passportization to claim that occupied populations ‘willingly’ accept Russian citizenship and that Russia’s claims to the occupied areas are incontrovertible and irreversible,” the think tank said.
From the early months of all-out war, the Kremlin has worked to make Russian citizenship easy to access across Russian-controlled regions of Ukraine, including the southern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. Senior Russian officials often claim Ukraine is a historically Russian territory.
Kyiv has in turn announced measures to safeguard the “national identity of Ukrainians” living in Russia.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.