“As for Russia regarding the certification.
Here it is simple to speak and can be assessed unequivocally: Russia violates, of course, absolutely all international law and so on, "Zelensky said in an interview with the Dom TV channel, without specifying specific offenses.
The Ukrainian president expressed the opinion that the issuance of passports in Donbass is no different "from the passportization that was in Crimea."
“First, you hand out passports to the Russian Federation, and then you enter and say: I protect my population.
Not only Russian-speaking, and their own culture, and so on.
They already have our culture - this is their culture and so on, the narrative is the same there, ”said the head of state.
He also said that Ukrainians with Russian passports "are put on buses, taken out, forced to vote."
“All this is some kind of slavery,” Zelensky added.
He summed up that "such actions, such steps are usually washed away by history, as after the rain."
“Maybe someday there will be one line in some books: well, there was certification in the history of Ukraine,” the Ukrainian leader said.
In April 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on the simplified acquisition of citizenship by residents of the self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics.
Moscow explained that the granting of citizenship is the sovereign prerogative of sovereign states, which is not limited by international law.
In this case, the granting of Russian citizenship is a forced humanitarian measure in the context of the socio-economic and transport blockade of Donbass introduced by Kiev, the Russian Foreign Ministry noted.
From 2016 to 2020, about 1 million Ukrainians received Russian citizenship, including not only residents of Donbass, said Dmitry Kozak, Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration of Russia.