On Thursday, March 30, the Head of the Board of the Crimean Tatar Resource Center Eskender Bariiev took part in an online meeting of the Law Enforcement Committee of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, during which the issue of criminalizing the fact that citizens of Ukraine living in the occupied territories receive Russian passports was discussed.
“It is important to study this issue in depth, because on the one hand, there are people who were forced to obtain Russian passports on the territory of Crimea, there are people who are collaborators, received Russian passports and do not have Ukrainian ones, or it is not known what status their documents are in, and the third are Russian citizens who are in Crimea,”,- Bariiev explained.
According to the expert, if passportization is criminalized, another problem will arise, because we are talking about more than two million people in Crimea, against whom procedural measures must be applied.
“In this regard, both Ukrainian law enforcement agencies and the judicial system will choke. Therefore, at the beginning of March 2023, at the initiative of the Crimean Tatar Resource Center, a strategic forum The Future of Crimea was held. At this strategic forum, experts outlined the following points: in particular, at the initial stage, it is necessary to introduce a special unified register of all individuals who will be identified on the territory of de-occupied Crimea. We must really understand that in the first period after the de-occupation there will be different people, because Crimea is different from other de-occupied territories”,- he stressed.
Eskender Bariiev added that Crimea has been occupied for more than 9 years. During this time, marriages were formed with citizens of the Russian Federation, new children grew up, who received their first passport not Ukrainian, but Russian. Therefore, in order to avoid chaos, including, in addition to the register, the strategic forum proposes the introduction of a temporary document, with the help of which data will be entered into a special register of individuals on the territory of the occupied Crimea.
“CTRC and all the experts of the strategic forum are ready to make a presentation for the Law Enforcement Committee in order to inform the MPs of Ukraine more about the expert developments that we have”,- said the Head of the CTRC Board.