Eleanor Knott with pro-Russian organizations and the pro-Russian political party. Only those associated with such associations saw ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Crimea as discriminated against. All other participants regarded these claims as ridiculous and the pro-Russian associations as political losers, given their marginal place in Crimean politics and their poor election results before 2014. It is the leaders of these pro-Russian associations that came to power as a result of annexation. Weaponisation of Citizenship as a Consequence of Annexation in Crimea I agree with Wrighton,60 who argues that Crimea’s residents were passportised after rather than prior to annexation. After annexation, en masse conferral of Russian citizenship was used as a coercive practice by an annexing power to force individuals – in a ‘climate of fear and repression’ – to become Russian citizens.61 The options to remain resident were either acquiring Russian citizenship, to retain property and other rights, or registering as a foreigner. As dissenting Russian politicians suggested, passportisation after annexation made Crimea not a republic but ‘a concentration camp inside Russia’.62 In doing so, Russia willingly breached the Geneva Convention, for example, by forcibly requiring state employees to renounce Ukrainian citizenship.63 As I outline above, it is important to identify when weaponisation of citizenship takes place, in particular, to find out when it occurs in relation to conflict. Passportisation unlikely occurred as a precursor to conflict in the case of Crimea. Instead, it occurred during and as a consequence of violent conflict, via Russia’s annexation. However, in Crimea, Russia not only weaponised citizenship but also forms of quasi-citizenship. In March 2014, Putin suggested that both Russian citizens and those Russia claimed as “compatriots” in Crimea were at an alleged risk and needed the Russian state to intervene to protect them.64 Weaponisation Beyond Citizenship and the Expanding Weaponisation of Citizenship In 2008 in Georgia, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia, Russia weaponised only citizenship, albeit citizenship achieved via passportisation policies. But in 2014, the weaponised community expanded beyond citizens and citizenship, to include fuzzier constituencies of those Russia claimed as compatriots. Again, following Jain, we return to the issue of consent: no one asks individuals whether they want to be regarded as quasi-citizens, and whether they want such claims of quasi-citizen status to be weaponised. Moreover, the states where these individuals reside are not asked for consent since these claims precisely take place in the context of conflict, war, occupation, and/or invasion. Keeping pace with the community that authoritarian, ethno-nationalist, and violent states wish to weaponise is, therefore, a challenge. This eventuality does not weaken the concept of weaponised citizenship but should make us mindful of how such a concept can become blunted if it is expanded by political actors. Following the weaponisation of “compatriots” in Crimea, as a category of quasi-citizens, Russia laid broader citizenship claims to Ukraine before launching war and invasion on 24 February 2022. As Igor Zevelev shows, Russia first facilitated fast-track naturalization to residents of the Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” (the DNR and LNR) in 2019, before then granting such fast-track 60 Wrighton S. (2018), ‘Authoritarian regime stabilization through legitimation, popular co-optation, and exclusion: Russian pasportizatsiya strategies in Crimea’, Globalizations, 15:2, 283-300, 61 ‘Ukraine: Fear, Repression in Crimea: Rapid Rights Deterioration in 2 Years of Russian Rule,’ Human Rights Watch, 18 March 2016, Ukraine: Fear, Repression in Crimea | Human Rights Watch (hrw.org). 62 Forsberg, T. & Mäkinen, S. (2019), ‘Russian Discourse on Borders and Territorial Questions – Crimea as a Watershed?’, Russian Politics, 4(2), 211-241. 63 ‘Situation of human rights in the temporarily occupied Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol (Ukraine)’ Human Rights Council 36th session, September 2017, A/HRC/36/CRP.3. 64 ‘Vladimir Putin submitted an appeal to the Federation Council’, Kremlin RU, 1 March 2014, Vladimir Putin submitted an appeal to the Federation Council • President of Russia (kremlin.ru). 13 Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies