Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 28 – Over the past
week, somewhat more than 20,000 residents of Crimea have asked for Russian
Federation passports and Russian officials have handed out about 6500, Anatoly
Fomenko, the deputy head of Russia’s Federal Migration Service, told Russia’s
official ITAR-TASS news agency earlier this week.
Fomenko said that Russian officials
are trying to provide passports in as “rapidly quick a manner” as possible but
that many of the 1.5 million people on the peninsula, “a quite large number” as
he observed, are going to have to show some “patience” (itar-tass.com/obschestvo/1073754).
That is because, he said, there are “definite
legal aspects” that must be attended to, aspects which make “the technology of
registration and handing out of a passport quite a complicated procedure,”
especially given that many people involved are either new to the task or only
recently arrived from the Russian Federation.
But given the overwhelming support
that Moscow said Crimeans had displayed in the referendum for joining their
peninsula to the Russian Federation, these figures are quite “miserly” and call
into question Russia’s claims about local attitudes, according to Oleg Kozyrev,
a Russian blogger who has examined the situation (besttoday.ru/posts/10300.html).
He notes that there are currently 27
districts in Crimea. Fomenko’s figure
mean that on average, only about 740 in each applied for a Russian passport,
even though some of these districts have populations of more than 65,000. That
means that only slightly more than one percent of the residents have decided to
take this step so far.
It is of course true that some
Crimean residents already have passports or are seeking to avoid what some have
claimed are “long lines” for those who apply now. But the figures Fomenko
offers do help to explain why the Russian authorities, apparently “in a panic,”
are threatening “’to hand out passports automatically’” to boost the numbers.
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