Crimeans will be able to receive Russian and Ukrainian pensions simultaneously
Moscow - Simferopol, July 22 (Navigator, Mikhail Stamm) - The Ukrainian government is ready to pay pensions to residents of Crimea if they refuse payments from Russia, Ukrainian authorities reported on Monday. But it will be difficult to verify that someone is already receiving one pension, and on this basis it will be difficult to refuse to receive another, so Crimeans who have not renounced Ukrainian citizenship can receive two pensions at once. According to experts, Kyiv is doing this so that Crimeans retain Ukrainian citizenship.
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The Ukrainian authorities, who did not recognize the results of the referendum in Crimea on joining Russia, are inviting Crimeans to apply for pensions from the Pension Fund in the Kherson region. At the moment we are talking about pensions for the second quarter of 2014, payments are supposed to be processed as international money transfers to post offices.
A message published on Monday on the government portal said that along with the application for the renewal of the pension, it is also required to provide “official confirmation of the refusal to receive the pension from the Russian side.” Russian lawyers do not quite understand what kind of document this should be.
“It is not clear what kind of certificate this will be,” says Veronika Salnikova, director of the Tver representative office of the Yakovlev and Partners legal group, surprised, adding that it is impossible to simply stop paying a pension. “We have an obligation to pay all residents of Crimea as of March 17 (the day after the referendum),” confirms Marita Nagoga, a representative of the Russian Pension Fund.
“It is difficult to say what kind of paper from the point of view of renouncing a pension can be provided to the Ukrainian authorities. Perhaps this will be a formal statement,” suggests Alexander Zakharov, partner at Paragon Advice Group.
It is difficult to imagine that a person living in Crimea would want to give up a Russian pension, Nagoga notes, so the statement of the Ukrainian authorities is more like “some kind of propaganda.” The size of the Russian pension is approximately twice as high, she recalls. Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets yesterday reported to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev that the level of pensions in Crimea has been brought up to the Russian average since July. In total, according to her data, 670 thousand pensioners live on the peninsula. If in March of this year their pension averaged 5504 rubles, now it is about 10 rubles, in Sevastopol - 620 rubles.
“People will not agree to this (refusal of Russian pensions). And if there are false papers, this is fraud, it is on their conscience,” says a representative of the Pension Fund of Russia.
At the same time, she admits, the Russian side does not check whether this or that citizen receives a pension in Ukraine. “There’s not even a hypothetical opportunity to check,” she says. Russian data on pensioners is now incomplete, Nagoga notes: the Ukrainian side has blocked the personal registration base, so now pensions in Crimea are assigned in the old fashioned way, based on work records.
“We can definitely say, even to the uninitiated, that the situation with a double pension is a more than realistic possibility,” he says. In April, the Minister of Social Policy of Ukraine Lyudmila Denisova spoke about the same thing on the air of the Black Sea TV and Radio Broadcasting Company.
Taking into account the fact that Russia is still ready to pay pensions to Ukrainian citizens in Crimea, it can be assumed that the proposal of the Ukrainian authorities is a negotiating ploy in the fight for the residents of Crimea to retain Ukrainian citizenship, Zakharov adds.
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