productive to challenge the long-term detention of a new category of de facto stateless people in the post-Soviet context: Ukrainians who fled to Russia in the aftermath of the military conflict in Eastern Ukraine.4 The ‘thick description’ (Geertz 2008) and analysis of a specific local citizenship and immigration regime, as a form of domination and control over citizenship can shed light onto how exactly the productive nature of the relationship between de jure and de facto statelessness can be galvanised. The situation of stateless former USSR citizens in Russia translates itself much easier to the legal culture of Russian judiciary characterised by rigid formalism and conservatism (Hendley, 2017; Kubal, 2016, 2018; Kurkchiyan, 2009). It is not because Russian judges are drawn to the powerless and have special sympathy for the stateless. Rather, the formal legal clarity of the post-Soviet de jure statelessness made the case of Mr Mskhiladze relatively easy to adjudicate especially when compared with more complex cases of other – and more recent – de facto stateless. Another important factor was a strong group of pro-bono immigration cause lawyers gathered around the ‘Migration and Law’ network (for their detailed description and characteristic, see Kubal, 2019), who fought this case through the ranks of the Russian justice system all the way to the RCC and the ECtHR. Upon the favourable landmark decision, they stopped at nothing ‘to push the authorities into compliance’ (Golubok quoted in Kubal 2019), and gradually extended the 4 While the changes simplifying the acquisition of Russian citizenship for Eastern Ukrainians signed by President Putin on 24 April 2019 can be seen as politically solving the question of de facto Ukrainian statelessness in Russia, this does not affect the conclusions contained in this paper. My analysis focuses on the legally productive relationship between de jure and de facto statelessness in the area of human rights and my conclusions hold true also for the Kyrgyz and Uzbek migrants without effective nationality in Russia. However, given the relatively high numbers of the de facto stateless Eastern Ukrainians in Russia prior to 2019, I decided to use this group as a poignant illustration of my point. 4