Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov considers the campaign to issue Russian passports in the LDPR absolutely legal.
He stated this at a meeting with voters in the Rostov region, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Recently, voices have begun to be heard that by carrying out passportization in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, Russia is violating international rules. All this is a lie...
In the same Ukraine, Hungarians, Poles, Romanians have passports of their states, and this did not raise any questions for anyone. As soon as we began issuing passports to people whom Kyiv declared “terrorists” and made victims of a trade, economic, and transport blockade, when old people are forced to walk many kilometers to receive pensions and humiliatingly stand in queues there...
As soon as we send humanitarian convoys there, they make statements and begin to demand to stop providing humanitarian assistance to the people they are trying to strangle,” Lavrov said.
On August 5, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky accused Russia of violating international law by issuing Russian passports to the population and called on those who advocate joining the region to the Russian Federation to “look for a place for themselves in Russia.”
The decree on the simplified issuance of Russian passports to residents of Donbass was signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin on April 24, 2019. More than 611 thousand residents of the DPR and LPR have already received Russian passports through a simplified procedure since its launch in 2019.