On Thursday, March 25, Ukraine’s Permanent Representative to International Organizations in Vienna Yevhen Tsymbaliuk, during a meeting of the OSCE Permanent Council, said that the Russian Federation continues to persecute residents of the Crimean Peninsula who renounced Russian citizenship, citing Putin’s decree on the prohibition of ownership of land plots for non-citizens of the Russian Federation. The representative of Ukraine stressed that after de-occupation, the rights of landowners violated by the occupying state will be fully restored.
“We are seeing a similar policy of introducing Russian citizenship in other temporarily occupied parts of Ukraine, that is, in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol. Seven years after the beginning of the occupation, Russia continues to persecute and punish those residents of the Crimean peninsula who rejected the citizenship imposed by Russia. Since March 2021, all citizens who don’t have a Russian passport are prohibited to own land plots in almost the entire peninsula, with the exception of a few areas”,- he said.
Tsymbaliuk stressed that this forced dispossession is legally null and void: after the de-occupation of Crimea, the rights of landowners violated by the occupying state will be fully restored.
“We again call on the Russian Federation to abolish the illegal occupation of Crimea, the militarization of the Black and Azov Seas and to end aggression against Ukraine, including by withdrawing its armed formations, mercenaries and their equipment from the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine and fully fulfilling its obligations under the Minsk agreements”,- he added.