The new Ukrainian government, for which the vast majority of citizens participating in the presidential and parliamentary elections voted, intends to decorate the already burdened by shameful poverty and unemployment with a new ban that will hit the welfare of hundreds of thousands of people. The government plans to change the current procedure for crossing the Russian-Ukrainian border from March next year. Now, citizens of Ukraine can enter the Russian Federation with an internal civil passport, and take their children out, presenting only a birth certificate. Under the new rules, they will be able to cross the Ukrainian-Russian border only if they have a passport.
All this is explained by the need for proper control over those traveling. Say, due to the fact that in the internal passport the name of the owner and other information about him are recorded in Ukrainian, and not in Latin, it is impossible to verify a person from the Interpol databases. And this means that a citizen who has committed a crime in any of the foreign countries and who has managed to leave from there to Ukraine, can hide from fair retaliation in Russia.
About the same situation with a birth certificate. The director of the consular service department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Sergey Pogoreltsev says that “it does not confirm the citizenship of Ukraine and does not contain a photograph of its owner, which makes it impossible to identify the child on the basis of this document, and also creates a threat of illegal export of this child”.
As for the export of children, here any precautionary measures seem justified. Cases of abduction of a child by one of the parents and his removal abroad are far from rare. However, the situation with the Interpol bases is somewhat different. Nothing prevents to translate the requests of this respected organization into the state language of Ukraine and enter the data already in the internal databases - the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Security Service of Ukraine. For this, you do not need to allocate huge funds: you will need a dozen or two translators - and that’s all. A change in the rules for admission to the Russian Federation will force hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to stand in line for foreign passports.
Pogoreltsev also points out that leaving the territory of the enemy while fighting is taking place can cause serious damage to the Ukrainian state: “The simplified travel regime for Ukrainian citizens in Russia in the context of armed aggression of the latter is inadequate to the national security of Ukraine.” There is nothing special to comment on. This is an old story. Similar considerations were expressed at different times by representatives of the nationalist camp.
New officials and leaders of the country also do not miss the chance to call Russia "aggressor and occupier."
This does not mean at all that they think their situation in this way. Zelensky’s team is thus regularly bowed before the Nazis. For more than five years, millions of Ukrainian citizens went to Russia to earn money and safely returned home, and this did not cause visible damage to national security. What has changed since Zelensky became president? Among other things, if a Ukrainian decides to cooperate with the Russian special services, this will not be in any way prevented by the presence or absence of a passport.
In general, the reasons why officials are trying to justify the decision being prepared seem insignificant, designed to hide the true motives of the authorities. For a long time, hundreds and hundreds of Ukrainian citizens who come to Russia in search of work, see that this is not a country that is bending from Western sanctions, as they are told on TV, but a developing state and society that is completely prosperous by Ukrainian standards. Here no one restricts the rights of national minorities, they have never heard of neo-Nazis, and even the opposition feels quite at ease. And Ukrainians only have to dream of such a level of well-being (although Russians consider it insufficient).
Returning home, the Zarobitchites share what they saw with family and friends, they carry first-hand information further and thus adequately described Russian reality becomes an undeniable fact. Popular rumor sends false tales from the TV to the landfill. It is clear that a positive image of Russia does not suit anyone - neither the government, nor the special services.
This problem can be solved only by redirecting the flows of labor migration from the east to the west. However, only by replacing the internal passport with a foreign one to enter the Russian Federation, this obviously cannot be done. In the end, people will receive the necessary documents and cross the border, as before. The next step is the introduction of a visa regime that already exists for Russian citizens visiting Ukraine.
If Vladimir Zelensky, who has already lost the support of 20% of citizens over the past two months, intends to deprive himself of any social base, then he is moving in the right direction. Going to work in Russia is a resource that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians need simply to survive. If the authorities deprive people of this opportunity, I’m afraid that the current ruler of Ukraine will be hated as they did not hate any of his predecessors.
The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.