Weaponised Citizenship: Should international law restrict oppressive nationality attribution? exercise their human rights and freedoms in Ukraine... We are not interfering in the internal affairs of Ukraine or engaged in a creeping annexation. We are simply giving people the opportunity to finally solve issues of vital importance to them, because the Kyiv authorities have refused to, in violation of the Minsk agreements… Russia is not imposing citizenship on the inhabitants of Donbas but rather giving them an opportunity to apply for it voluntarily and independently under the established procedure to the competent Russian authorities while preserving their Ukrainian citizenship.’17 While it is easy enough to refute the credibility of these claims, it is nonetheless difficult to dismiss outright the trajectory of the passportisations in Crimea and the Donbas region as a blanket form of “personal annexation”.18 A strict consent/non-consent dichotomy indeed may underestimate the strategic targeting of the passportisation schemes that have historically relied on a mix of co-optation and coercion. While the former exploits the identity and influence of the former Soviet Union as a regional hegemon coupled with the provision of material benefits such as pensions and access to social services to passportised Russians, the latter penalises the rejection of Russian citizenship through administrative exclusion from public life.19 This exercise in strategic passportisation is thus difficult to challenge on the basis of current principles of consent in the international law on nationality. However, similar to the previous case of oppressive nationality, it may be possible to argue that the passportisations have had negative consequences for purported beneficiaries. Prior to the Russian invasion, and according to an intriguing claim by Burkhardt et al.,20 this is a result of the perpetual state of limbo in which “diminished citizens” of Donetsk and Luhansk found themselves, whereby they had less than full membership in any political community, including Russia, due to the inability to exercise social and electoral rights similar to Russian citizen-residents. Instead, they were compelled to make rights claims before the parent state of Ukraine, the de facto state authorities in the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics, as well as the patron state of Russia. For Burkhardt et al., passportisation, however, does not only result in diminished citizenship but also diminished sovereignty of the “parent state” by keeping the latter and its contested territory “in a permanent and fragile state of exception.”21 Indeed, it is this latter concern that has prompted reactions by international lawyers,22 who have argued that naturalisation is not a bilateral, but rather a trilateral relationship between the original state of nationality, the naturalised individual, and the naturalising state, and one that moreover has an impact on the global public interest. This is due to the parent state’s continuing interest in maintaining enduring ties to its nationals–– a state that lost all its nationals to naturalisations could cease to be a state––and exercising diplomatic protection on their behalf. Scholars argue that mass naturalisations, in particular of individuals who do not have strong links to the state of naturalisation, may thus infringe upon the sovereignty of the parent state. And as such, they would constitute an abuse of rights by the state of naturalisation and violate international law norms such as the principle of good neighbourly relations between states. The abuse would consist in the exercise of rights (of allocating citizenship) in a manner that is arbitrary or that negatively impacts the enjoying of other states’ rights.23 In the case of Russia, these concerns have been augmented by Russia’s subsequent attempts to justify its use of force against Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, and the invasion of Ukraine, on the basis that it is acting to protect the rights of its citizens. But Russia is not the only country whose passportisation practices have set international alarm bells ringing. Indeed, though Russian policies have been widely condemned by the international community and Russian passports are not 17 ‘Letter dated 13 April 2014 from the Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations addressed to the President of the Security Council’, 8529th meeting of the Security Council, S/PV.8529 (2019). 18 Peters 2010. 19 Wrighton S. (2018), ‘Authoritarian regime stabilization through legitimation, popular co-optation, and exclusion: Russian pasportizatsiya strategies in Crimea’, Globalizations 15(2) 283-300. 20 Burkhardt F. Rabinovych M., Wittke C., and Bescotti E. (2022), Citizenship Rights, And The Donbas Vote In Russia’s 2021 Duma Elections, Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program. 21 Id. 22 Id. 23 Id. European University Institute 4