By Galina Korol | 2024-01-29

KYIV -- Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree simplifying the naturalization procedure for foreigners as a way to boost his troops fighting in Ukraine, according to media reports.

The policy of encouraging everyone regardless of citizenship to fight in Ukraine, which the Kremlin has adopted as it contends with staggering casualties, is costing foreign men their lives and offending even friendly regimes like Cuba's.

Russia has lost 315,000 dead or injured combatants since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, according to a US Defense Department estimate in December.

Now that even the Kremlin is unable to ignore the number of Russian men who have perished, it is attempting to lure foreign men into battle.

Putin's January 4 decree makes foreigners who sign a minimum one-year contract with the Russian military or "military formations" eligible for Russian citizenship, according to analysts at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) based in Washington, DC.

The spouses, children and parents of foreigners serving in the Russian army also will be eligible for citizenship.

The decree also cuts the length of the naturalization process from three months to one.

"The January 4 decree likely aims to further streamline and simplify the citizenship application process while formalizing migrant recruitment efforts following increased raids on migrant communities since summer 2023 in which Russian officials have issued military summonses to migrants with Russian citizenship," the ISW report said.

Raids on migrants

For Russia, the new year began with mass roundups of migrants so they could be sent to Ukraine, according to Russian Telegram channels.

Arrests were carried out on the night of January 1 in Moscow's central districts and in St. Petersburg, near the Gostiny Dvor subway station, where journalists say at least 50 men were detained.

"Migrants are also being detained near Admiralteyskaya [St. Petersburg subway station]," the publication FREEDOM reported January 11, quoting messages posted on the Telegram channel of Paper, a news site.

"At least two buses carrying detained migrants left the station. The arrests are not as widespread as near Gostiny Dvor -- the police are approaching men in line near Palace Square in order to inspect them and taking them to buses one by one," it said.

These raids have a single purpose: to coerce migrants into fighting in the war in Ukraine, say journalists.

Russian officials tried this tactic this winter after first attempting to push migrants across the border into Finland, the ISW reported December 6.

A Russian-instigated surge of migrants trying to enter Finland prompted the Finns to close their entire border until February 11. Subsequently, hundreds of migrants gathered on the Russian side, and many were detained by the police.

The BBC's Russian service analyzed court rulings handed down by district courts in Karelia, Russia, in relation to violations of immigration law.

In total, in November and early December, there were 236 rulings on immigration law violations, but almost all of them occurred between November 16 and early December.

"The picture is similar in two other regions on the Finnish border where flows of migrants were noted -- in Leningrad and Murmansk provinces: all the detentions of foreigners began after mid-November, when Finland announced the closure of border crossings," the BBC Russian service reported December 6.

The broadcaster said Russian authorities sent foreigners to a military camp on the Ukrainian border days after detaining them for violating immigration laws.

'Everything we were told was a lie'

Russian authorities promised to allow the men to stay in Russia after they completed their one-year military contract.

"We were told there would be a contract for one year, with training and various options, with good wages and medicine. But they didn't say anything about the Ukrainian border and the war," an unidentified foreign man told the BBC. "Everything we were told was a lie."

For safety reasons, the BBC did not name the source, writing only that he is from Somalia and came to Russia on a tourist visa with the goal of immigrating to Europe. In the end, after failing to reach Finland, he was detained along with other migrants for having expired documents.

It is no surprise that Russia decided to use migrants this way, said Oleksandr Solontai, director of practical policy programs at the Institute of Political Education in Kyiv.

"A unique opportunity for Russian recruiters arises here: on the one hand, they wanted to create a crisis with these men. That didn't work, but these men are here. They are nearby. They take the immigrants' passports. They . .. hold them in detention centers. ... In legal terms, they are places of confinement. They work on the immigrants there. They trick them," Solontai told Kontur.

"But this isn't something that will end in success."

Killing off Russia's minorities

Russia's drive for recruits is also destroying the small ethnic groups of Russia itself, according to Vladimir Budayev, co-founder of the Free Buryatia Foundation.

Many more men are drafted from Russia's regions than from Moscow or St. Petersburg, he said. According to Budayev, when the Ukraine draft began in Buryatia, press gangs grabbed everyone they saw.

Authorities handed out summonses on the streets, escorted students out of their classes at universities, and even nabbed a motorist at a gas station and pushed him into a bus of draftees.

"The fact that it [the war draft] continues proves that Vladimir Putin doesn't have enough men for the war, so he's going to great lengths to just throw drafted men into the cauldron of war," Budayev told Kontur.

"There are villages in Buryatia where 100% of those drafted died," he added.

With the war in Ukraine, Putin is trying to "kill two birds with one stone" -- not only to conduct genocide against Ukraine but also, in effect, to continue genocide of enslaved indigenous minorities in Russia, according to Kyiv resident Taras Byk, co-organizer of the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum.

"There really is a reason to say that Putin is using this war to solve the issue of the growing non-Russian population in Russian territory," he told Kontur. "Some researchers believe that this population could be as high as 40%."

Russia presently includes 22 internal republics and more than 100 indigenous peoples, which, according to analysts, Russia simply colonized after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Now these peoples are taking small steps to begin to fight for their independence, which Ukraine supports.

On August 24, its parliament created a Temporary Special Commission that will work with Russia's small ethnic groups. Members of those communities are holding meetings and forums in many European countries, said Byk.

"Representatives of these peoples will convey their opinion that, yes, we exist, we want independent republics, we do not represent Russia, Russia does not represent us, so that the West begins to analyze this," he said.

Progress has begun on this path, he said, adding that the West has seen Russia's fragility and is beginning to consider and somehow prepare for its possible collapse.

Angering foreign governments

Even faraway countries like Cuba and Nepal have detected Russian attempts to recruit their male citizens and are reacting with outrage.

In early autumn the Cuban Interior Ministry exposed a Russian network that was recruiting Cuban citizens to join the war against Ukraine, according to the Cuban Foreign Ministry.

Cuban authorities neutralized these efforts and initiated prosecution of the culprits, the Foreign Ministry said.

Nepalese authorities on December 4 asked the Russian authorities to stop recruiting Nepalese men and to return the bodies of six Nepalese combatants killed in Ukraine, Reuters reported December 5.

On December 4, Ukrainian journalist Andriy Tsaplienko published an exclusive video with a captured Nepalese soldier on his Telegram channel.

He told Tsaplienko that he had been serving in the Russian army's 70th Regiment for 195,000 RUB (almost $2,200) a month until Ukrainian forces captured him.