oblasts’ (Burtina, 2018a: 14). The refusal of the Ukrainian government to admit its own citizens could be interpreted as a politically motivated decision – these men and women chose to flee the conflict toward Russia, viewed as an aggressor and a party to the conflict (Rettman, 2019). This led to the creation of a new group of de facto stateless people in the post-Soviet space, who, alongside refugees and internally displaced persons in Ukraine, became yet another human consequence of the military conflict in Eastern Ukraine (Pikulicka-Wilczewska & Uehling, 2017). They were placed in Russian detention centres potentially indefinitely, not necessarily because there was no country willing to take them back, but because of the refusal of their own country to readmit them. Russian immigration lawyers relying on the provision in the Mskhiladze judgment started pursuing the cases of these de facto stateless Ukrainians before the domestic courts. They secured a number of reversals (Burtina, 2018a, 2018b) – particularly in St Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Moscow and Rostov-on-Don. Below I discuss one such case of a Ukrainian national, ‘Mr Yakubov’. ‘Mr Yakubov’ is a composite character; I use this form to preserve the anonymity of the different individuals who benefited from the Mskhiladze judgment, but also to help the reader understand the overall conditions accompanying the emergence of this new group of de facto stateless Ukrainians in Russia. ‘Mr Roman Yakubov’ arrived in Russia from the Luhansk oblast in Eastern Ukraine in spring 2014. Throughout his stay in Russia, he had a number of different legal statuses, but he did not manage to secure any of them for longer than a year. Initially he applied for a work licence, but given that his employment was not stable, he could not gather enough money to pay the fee to renew it. He then tried to apply for a temporary asylum, but the authorities questioned his application given that he previously had a work licence in Russia. In the meantime, his passport has expired; he feared returning to Luhansk and given that his house 18