Crimean authorities confiscated Russian passports from 500 local residents
A special commission in the annexed Crimea is studying the legality of issuing Russian passports to the peninsula’s residents in 2014, a journalist from Sevastopol, Andrei Vasiliev, stated to Krym.Realii.
According to him, the authorities of the Crimea have been monitoring and noting a variety of violations of Russian legislation.
"Judicial contradiction began in 2014, when documents were issued to all citizens of Ukraine who had registered in the Crimea and Sevastopol. But due to the unclear procedures, people who had not resided in the Crimea by March 2014 also received passports, including refugees from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, or Kyiv citizens who had real estate on the peninsula," Vasiliev stated.
It was noted that according to the information in Crimean media, in Sevastopol alone, 528 people had their passports revoked.
According to the Directorate for Migration Affairs of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, 44,000 residents of the peninsula have already been verified.
After the annexation of the Crimea, Russia automatically recorded the inhabitants of the peninsula among the ranks of its citizens, according to the law "On Admitting to the Russian Federation the Republic of Crimea and Establishing within the Russian Federation the New Constituent Entities of the Republic of Crimea and the City of Federal Importance Sevastopol." At the end of 2015, the Russian Federal Migration Service (FMS) claimed that it had issued more than two million passports to Crimeans.
As reported, biometric passports for Ukrainians with a residence permit in the annexed territories will be issued after a special verification procedure.