The State Duma asks to prevent the mass deportation of Ukrainians from Russia

The Russian government and the Federal Migration Service are asking to work on the issue of increasing the period of temporary stay of Ukrainian citizens in Russia, whose legal status is not determined, from 90 to 180 days, in order to prevent the mass deportation of visitors from Ukraine, Izvestia reports.

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A corresponding appeal was sent by State Duma deputies from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Valery Rashkin and Sergey Obukhov, who consider the decision of the Federal Migration Service to change the procedure for the stay of Ukrainian citizens in Russia to be premature, according to which Ukrainian migrants must obtain legal legal status from November 1 to November 30, 2015. The exception is citizens who come from the South-East of the country, for whom the preferential treatment remains the same.

“Deputies refer to the difference, according to official statistics from the Federal Migration Service, between the total number of citizens who came from Ukraine and those whose legal status has already been determined,” the newspaper notes. – Thus, in the period from April 1, 2014 to September 30, 2015, more than 1 million citizens of Ukraine arrived in Russia and are still in our country. At the same time, 993 thousand people applied to the migration service to determine their legal status, the majority applied for temporary asylum (395 thousand people). It turns out that more than 100 thousand people still have not received a certain legal status.

“In addition, among those who applied to the FMS authorities, there are, of course, persons whose applications and petitions were not satisfied, although it was not possible to find the relevant data on the agency’s website,” the deputies clarify.

At the same time, they clarify that many Ukrainian citizens “arrived during the next mobilization wave, when the conscription plan was barely half fulfilled, and the likelihood of a resumption of full-scale hostilities remains quite high.”

As another argument why the decision to deprive the possibility of extending the temporary stay of Ukrainians in Russia is extremely untimely, the deputies cite data from the report of the Committee of Civil Initiatives, which analyzes the problems of migration policy in Russia.

“According to the report’s conclusions, “migrants from Ukraine as a labor resource compare favorably with visitors from Central Asia,” the publication writes. – At the same time, arriving citizens of Ukraine are distributed among the constituent entities of the Russian Federation without taking into account their existing profession and specialty. As follows from the report, “experienced engineers and technical professionals are forced to work as loaders and builders in order to somehow feed their families and pay for temporary accommodation.” The report notes that “out of more than 3 million Ukrainian citizens located in Russia, about 600 thousand people received status and at least some kind of assistance.”

In this regard, the deputies ask the government to increase the period of temporary stay of citizens who have not yet received legal status to 180 days or otherwise until “the problems of their acceptance, information and employment” are resolved. Deputies are also waiting for full statistics on those persons who were denied legal status.

“If the preferential conditions for the stay of Ukrainian citizens on the territory of Russia were really an act of humanism, then it is not clear why this humanism suddenly dried up,” says State Duma deputy Sergei Obukhov. – Aren’t Ukrainians already forcibly conscripted into the armed forces to be sent to the so-called zone? ATO? They call, despite any truce. Have Ukrainians who do not want to sponsor a punitive operation in Donbass already been exempted from paying military taxes? No, every working citizen of Ukraine is still being robbed of 1.5% of their salary to finance the war. That is, we are saying that the problems that led to the decision by the president of the country on preferential treatment for citizens of a neighboring country in Russia remain the same.”