‘You’re not human:’ A legal limbo for Russian nationals in Ukraine 

Kyiv, Ukraine – Taras always resented his dark-red Russian passport – and was happy to replace it with a blue Ukrainian one. But it was a process that took him 11 years and two trials.

He is one of more than 150,000 Russian nationals living in Ukraine as the war with Russia continues. Most are relatives or spouses of Ukrainians or were born in Ukraine. Some are dissidents seeking refuge or volunteers with the Ukrainian army.

They go through several rounds of bureaucratic quagmire to have their residence permits renewed or get Ukrainian citizenship, and face mistreatment anywhere they have to show the colour of their passport.

“If you have a red passport here, you’re not human, even if you have Ukrainian blood, speak Ukrainian and donate to the armed forces of Ukraine,” the bespectacled 45-year-old graphic designer told Al Jazeera.

Taras asked to withhold his last name that he shares with his siblings living in Russia, because he does not want them to “get into more trouble than they already are” because of their Ukrainian background.

Born in the city of Poltava in Soviet Ukraine in 1980, Taras, the son of a colonel, grew up 500km (310 miles) to the east, in what is now the western Russian city of Bryansk; his father headed a tank regiment.

He spent his summers in a village outside Poltava, where his grandparents taught him to speak Ukrainian and “be a regular Cossack”, Taras said with a smile, referring to the medieval warrior caste.

He received the Russian passport after turning 16 and studied art history and design in St Petersburg, Russia’s former imperial capital and President Vladimir Putin’s hometown.

With a freelance job to design brochures, posters and calendars, he decided to move to Poltava a year after Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.

Getting residence papers and a “permit to migrate” and obtaining citizenship was easy, but he made a mistake of “procrastinating for too long” about getting the blue passport.

“That was a stupid mistake that cost me a lot of time, money and nerves,” Taras sighed.

“I nagged him every day for years, but he waited until the full-scale [invasion] began” in 2022, his wife Tetiana, whom he married in 2019, told Al Jazeera.

Kyiv immediately severed diplomatic ties with Moscow, complicating a key condition for Taras’s full-fledged Ukrainian citizenship.

Until June 2025, Ukraine banned dual citizenship, and aspiring nationals had two years to prove they had withdrawn from their previous citizenship.

In the case of Russians, they have to prove they face no criminal or administrative charges, have no debt and are not registered in somebody’s apartment or house.

To submit and get the papers, Taras took an overnight train to neighbouring Moldova, where Russian embassy officials snubbed his requests, “lost” his papers and whispered “traitor” and “fascist”, Taras said.

He was luckier than many other Russians living in Ukraine.

There have been cases of Ukraine’s migration services refusing to renew expired residence permits, Kyiv-based migration lawyer Daria Tarasenko told Al Jazeera.

The stranded Russians’ problems worsen when their passport expires. It takes up to three trips to a third country to renew it, submit it and receive the documents to get the passport they hope to abandon soon.

And if the two-year deadline is not met, there have been cases when the migration service strips people of their Ukrainian citizenship, Tarasenko said.

She said she had won two cases when courts deemed the decisions illegal, and several similar cases were pending.

In late 2024, the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s lower house of parliament, voted to change the migration law, allowing Russian nationals to wait for the war’s end plus one more month to start the termination of their red passports, she said.

By that time, Taras was tired of trains to Moldova and endless bickering inside the Russian embassy’s sprawling, white building.

He was told that a “declarative rejection” of his Russian citizenship could suffice, but the migration services rejected his “declaration”.

He sued them, and a court ruled that he could finally get the blue passport.

The Poltava migration service disagreed, and Taras sued again. This time, the court ruled that the officials in charge of issuing his passport should be fined.

“And as soon as it became money out of their pocket, they were like, ‘Good, come get the passport,’” Taras said.

He did – last August.

He cannot be drafted because of severe, progressing myopia coupled with astigmatism, while many other men with Russian passports prefer to hold on to their residence permits and obtain their Ukrainian passports after the war.

Others are so desperate that they resort to symbolic vandalism.

In early January, Andriy Kramar, an advertising executive in Kyiv, burned his wife Valery’s Russian passport on a gas stove in the kitchen of their apartment in Hostomel, a suburb that was briefly seized by Russia in 2022.

They live with their newborn daughter, Oleksandra, amid days-long blackouts caused by Russian shelling and with no running water.

“That alone could drive you crazy,” he told Al Jazeera.

Kramar posted the video of the burning passport on Facebook, tagging Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration and adding: “Give my wife a normal passport!”