little or no protections, or actually locks people in dangerous and precarious situations. This seems particularly pertinent to the situation of many currently stateless persons in post-Soviet Russia (Swider 2017). Viewing statelessness as a problem ‘to be solved’ by channelling people to acquire different nationalities may actually result in creating more vulnerabilities. I concur with Swider, that at the normative level, priority should be given to the protection of rights of stateless persons over eradication of their statelessness, especially, since the human rights protection regime around de jure statelessness can actually become a legally productive platform to help secure rights for people without an effective nationality. The successful legal challenge to post-Soviet statelessness Let me return to Mr Mskhiladze. In the opening paragraphs of this paper, he found himself in a detention centre, with an expulsion order to a country that no longer existed. In view of these developments, the Federal Bailiffs Service (the body responsible for the enforcement of the courts’ decisions in Russia) petitioned the St Petersburg court to terminate the enforcement proceedings of the removal of Mr Mskhiladze and have him released from detention. It has to be stressed that the Federal Bailiffs Service did not file this petition out of goodwill and sympathy toward the stateless Mr Mskhiladze, but because the impossibility to enforce this judgment ‘looked bad’ in their performance records (see: McCarthy, 2018). The St Petersburg court however dismissed this petition and insisted that there was no statutory basis in the law for granting such application. At this point Mr Mskhiladze’s legal representatives filed a petition to the RCC as this case demonstrated an important structural problem with the constitutional interpretation of the different elements of Russian law. First, there was the question of the length of Mr Mskhiladze’s detention pending administrative removal (Article 31.9 CAO). The law did not 10