Joint Forces Commander: Russia could issue about 300 thousand passports in occupied Donbas

 “One of the most destabilizing factors both in the Joint Forces Operation area and in our state is the Russian government's actions to grant Russian citizenship to residents of certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. According to official data of the migration services, 136,000 residents of the temporarily occupied territories received Russian citizenship in 2019. If the rate of activity of residents of these quasi-state formations maintains and the capabilities of Russian migration services expand in 2020, this figure may exceed the threshold of 300,000 people,” Joint Forces Commander Volodymyr Kravchenko said in an interview with Ukrinform.

At the same time, he noted, the current socio-economic indicators of the occupied territories of Donbas confirm the existence of systemic problems - the closure of enterprises, production facility shutdown, lack of profit, inability to pay wages and taxes, debt accumulation, uneven economic development of individual areas. According to Kravchenko, the occupation administrations demonstrate the inability of independent economic activity without financial support and markets of the Russian Federation.

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