that there were 113,474 stateless persons in 2014,14 82,148 in 2017,15 and 75,679 as of early 2019.16 There is no doubt that the actual number of stateless persons in Russia is much higher. Current Russian laws make no account for the special aspects of stateless persons and equate them with foreign nationals, even though the legal situation of these two groups could not be more different. Now stateless persons in Russia are arrested for “violation of migration rules,” sentenced to court-ordered expulsion, and then deprived of their liberty, to all intents and purposes indefinitely, since it is not possible to deport them to any country. They are released after two years (the maximum possible time to “secure deportation”), but they are not issued any documents that would allow them to remain in Russia legally. As a result, they are often imprisoned again as violators of migration rules. Russia has not implemented the strategic decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (primarily in the case of Kim v. Russia, 2015) and the most important decision issued by Russia’s Constitutional Court (case of Noé Mskhiladze, 2017), which could fundamentally improve the situation of stateless persons in Russia. Even though the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs developed a draft law two years ago envisaging that stateless persons would be issued identity documents giving them the right to reside in Russia, the right to work without work licenses and permits, and the possibility for former Soviet citizens to acquire Russian citizenship under simplified procedures, there is still no information that this draft is being considered by the State Duma. On November 1, 2018, the Russian president approved a new framework for migration policy,17 which prioritized actions to improve conditions for Russians living abroad to move back home, but said almost nothing about the need to provide identity documents for stateless persons. 14 UNHCR. 2014 in Review. http://unhcr.org/556725e69.html 15 UNHCR statistics for 2017: http://www.unhcr.org/statistics/17-WRD-table-7.xls 16 Data published during the International Conference on Statelessness for the Member States of the Commonwealth of Independent States, Minsk, 2018 https://www.statelessness. eu/blog/joint-steps-end-statelessness-commonwealth-independent-states 17 Roadmap for RF State Migration Policy for 2019–2025 http://kremlin.ru/events/ president/news/58986 12