Passportization, Diminished Citizenship Rights, and the Donbas Vote in Russia's 2021 Duma Elections

Referring in this paper to the extraterritorial naturalization of Donbas residents en masse, passportization is one of Russia’s preeminent foreign policy tools to deepen the potentially explosive deadlock in the implementation of the Minsk Agreements. In this deadlock, passportization can serve as a tool of ambiguous Russian extraterritorial governance over the Donbas while keeping violence at a comparatively low level, or as a tool to justify a full-scale Russian military intervention to "protect" its citizens from, for example, a purported "genocide." Russia does not necessarily want more citizens or territories: Russia’s ultimate goals are far-ranging security guarantees to prevent Ukraine’s further integration or membership with NATO. Passportization is one of the instruments to achieve this overarching goal. Passportization of residents of the non-government-controlled areas of the Donbas does not endow these Ukrainians with full membership of the Russian state; they are "second-class citizens" with diminished rights. This becomes especially apparent with regard to not only international non-recognition, but also pensions, social benefits, and voting rights. Due to this "diminished citizenship," Russia suffers from a legitimacy deficit in the self-proclaimed "People's Republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk - the "DPR" and "LPR." Enforcing voting rights for Donbas residents in the 2021 Duma elections therefore served the purpose of legitimizing Russia in the residents’ eyes: It suggested that integration with Russia is continuously advancing. In the 2021 Russian Duma (parliamentary) elections, the turnout among eligible passportized Donbas residents was above 40 percent. Of the roughly 200,000 voters, three quarters voted electronically at de facto polling stations (so-called "information centers") on the territory of the "DPR" and "LPR"; one quarter travelled to polling stations in the neighboring Rostov region in Russia. With the whole adult population of the "DPR" and "LPR" as a reference point, less than 10 ...