RT is now reporting that Putin said Russia may offer fast-track citizenship to all Ukrainians at the Belt and Road summit in Beijing [he later did].
He has also reacted forcefully to critics of giving Donbass residents citizenship:
These rumors are spread by people who don’t want Russia to support the people in Donbass. There will be no serious burden on the Russian budget, we have calculated everything.
So what did I tell you? This as good as confirms that PUTLER reads my blog. Back in October 2018, I suggested that best course of action now is to drain the Ukraine of human capital. This will now become much easier… assuming this is actually followed up.
Will it be?
Well, my/Kholmogorov’s suggestions from antoher post written soon afterwards have been adopted by the kremlins:
For instance, as Kholmogorov has recently suggested, one powerful way this ideological reformulation – if indeed it is to be taken seriously – can be implemented is in the Donbass, which is ripe for mass distributions of Russian passports. Furthermore, Putin explicitly mentioned the long-suffering Donbass in his speech, alluding to their struggle to preserve their national roots and traditions. But if Russians are henceforth to be defined by their Russianness, and the Donbass is fighting to preserve its Russianness, then it becomes ridiculous to continue portraying the War in the Donbass as an internal Ukrainian affair, as Kremlin propaganda has been doing since the end of the abortive “Russian Spring” in 2014.
But that post also included the following:
According to the latest report from Kommersant, the desirability of increasing labor immigration from the Ukraine and Belorussia has been explicitly specified. According to an anonymous official, the next legislative change could involve the cancelation of Russian language requirements for citizens of those countries for obtaining Russian citizenship: “They all speak Russian there anyway,” notes the official in question. There will likely be further deregulation of naturalization procedures for highly qualified specialists and people who finished university with flying colors.
So hopefully these general trends – making Russian citizenship easier to obtain for Russians abroad, and ultimately not just in the Ukraine – will continue progressing in that vein.
PS. It is very telling that “liberal” commenters, both in Russia and the West, have been so triggered by the passports decision. As Egor Prosvirnin noted on his livestream with Zhuchkovsky yesterday, internationalist liberalism ends when it comes to Russia issuing passports to Russians in the LDNR, and Russian socialism ends when it comes to paying pensions to Donbass grandmothers (a whole bunch of people who complained about Putin raising pensions now condemn him for deciding to subsidize Donbass parasites… even though this is not even strictly true, as people who continue to reside in the Donbass will apparently be ineligible for Russian pensions unless they move to Russia).
But back to the topic at hand. Is Russia forcing anybody to accept passports?No, it isn’t. It is offering people choices. Opening up borders. Isn’t labor mobility an important part of globalization, which has brought immense prosperity to the world the past few decades? Indeed, do not many other countries, such as Israel and Hungary, already long have such politicies, though even more implicitly ethnonationalist in character? Why are they not getting condemned and accused of “escalating” tensions? The answer is that their support for cosmopolitanism and globalization ends wherever Russia starts to benefit from them too.
PPS. Seriously, what happened to Putin to make him go from putlet to PUTLER within less than a year?