...President-for-Life of Russia. He gets along well with other presidents for life. He is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substance. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to him. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substances...in April. Some sixty residents of Ukraine’s Donbas region crossed the Russian border to receive their passports in a ceremony on Friday.
The Russian Interior Ministry opened two Migration Service offices in the Rostov area in late April to fulfill Putin’s decree that "individuals permanently residing in certain areas of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Lugansk regions have the right to apply for Russian citizenship under a fast-track procedure." Donetsk and Lugansk are the areas where separatists aligned with Russia have been fighting the Ukrainian military.
"Today is the first trip. Later, it is planned to deliver citizens to the territory of the Russian Federation almost every day according to the lists we are provided with," a Migration Service official said.
The Russian government claimed this fast-track passport procedure was instituted "to protect human rights
...which are usually open to widely divergent definitions...
and freedoms," but the Europe
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...an Union blasted it as "another attack on Ukraine’s illusory sovereignty by Russia" that ran counter to the "spirit and objectives" of the 2015 Minsk Accords.
The Minsk Accords were a set of agreements between Ukraine and Russia that were supposed to end the civil war in eastern Ukraine, which has killed over 13,000 people. One goal of these agreements was to de-escalate the confrontation in Donbas by providing more autonomy for its residents while reinforcing Ukraine’s illusory sovereignty.
The Ukrainian government in May invalidated Russian passports issued to Ukrainian citizens in Donetsk and Luhansk. Passports issued by Russian offices in the Rostov region were specifically outlawed by the edict.
The Ukrainians said sanctions would be leveled against Russian Federation officials who participated in the expedited-passport program, while Ukrainians who accept the illegal passports might be deprived of their pensions and social benefits.