Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 1 – As winter
approaches, Moscow is set to expel many if not most of the Ukrainians who fled
from the fighting in eastern Ukraine last year, an action that will place new
burdens on Kyiv but not on the breakaway regions (Ukrainians from there are not
affected by this rule) and threatens to create a humanitarian disaster.
Today, the special migration regime
that Moscow created for Ukrainians last year runs out, and any Ukrainians in
Russia except those from Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, now can live in the Russian
Federation no more than 90 days in the course of every six month period (ura.ru/news/1052228657 and topwar.ru/85457-lgotnyy-rezhim-prebyvaniya-ukraincev-v-rf-otmenen.html).
If a Ukrainian citizen does not “legalize”
his or her status by getting a work permit or securing residency by another
means, Russian officials says, he or she will have 30 days to leave the Russian
Federation. A failure to do so will lead to expulsion and a ban on entrance to
Russia of from three to ten years.
According to Russia’s Federal Migration
Service, there are approximately 2.6 million Ukrainian citizens now on Russian
territory, of whom more than a million are from the Donbas. It is not clear how
many Ukrainians have work permits, but fewer than a thousand have been given
refugee status.
In reporting all this, the URA.ru
news agency says that a large number of Ukrainians face “mass deportation” at
the end of November, precisely the time when the weather in Ukraine and Russia
too becomes harshest and problems with providing shelter, heating and food are
most acute.
In that context, Moscow’s exclusion of
Ukrainians from the Donbas from any expulsion order shows that this action is
intended to hurt Kyiv in the first instance. That alone should be the occasion
for the international community to protest what Moscow is doing and to provide
help to the Ukrainian authorities for the likely return of several hundred
thousand Ukrainians.
No comments:
Post a Comment