Fewer from Abroad are Taking Russian Citizenship Now and More who Do So are Migrant Workers from Central Asia, Further Reducing Ethnic Russian Share of Country’s Population

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 24 – The number of people from abroad taking Russian citizenship has dropped from 691,000 in 2022 to 152,400 last year, Russian government statistics show; and a growing percentage of those who continue to do so are not ethnic Russians returning to their homeland but non-Russian migrants from Central Asia trying to protect their families.

            Prior to the beginning of Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine, Moscow promoted the return of what it calls “compatriots” to their homeland, and it used these returnees to hide the demographic decline of its own population (nemoskva.net/2026/03/23/menshe-grazhdan-bolshe-shtrafov-interes-inostranczev-k-rossijskomu-grazhdanstvu-stremitelno-snizhaetsya/).

            Because most of these 600,000 to 700,000 people a year were ethnic Russians or at least Slavic, Moscow was also able to claim that the share of ethnic Russians in the population had not declined but if anything increased, something that pleased both the Kremlin and the increasing number of Russian nationalists in the population.

            But with the onset of the war in Ukraine, this source of immigration has rapidly declined both overall and in terms of its ethnic content.  According to Pavel Pryanikov, who edits the Tolkovatel telegram channel, ever more of those claiming Russian citizenship are not ethnic Russians but Muslims from Central Asia (svpressa.ru/society/news/508033/).

            That has happened, he suggests, because Moscow’s ever harsher policies toward migrants have made some of their number decide that the best course for themselves and their families is to take Russian citizenship. That has kept the number of people taking Russian citizenship from declining still further, but now that number includes many non-Russians as well.

            As a result, Russian statisticians will find it more difficult to continue to hide the obvious: the population of the Russian Federation is not only declining overall but the share of the ethnic Russian part of that population is declining as well – while the share of that population which is non-Russian is increasing, at least in part because of the Kremlin’s own policies.