UN conventions) and local human rights jurisprudence (e.g. the European Court of Human Rights, see Abramenko 2019, Lambert 2018). This, as Sigona argues, ‘complicates Hannah Arendt's insightful characterization of stateless people as rightless’ (2016: 263), but also shows an opportunity for the legally productive mobilisation of these rights by people in de facto stateless situations. While the international legal instruments encourage such interpretation (1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, especially Resolution No. I, see Massey 2010: i), the scholarship on the lived experiences of de facto statelessness reveals that this rarely occurs in practice (Blitz & Otero-Iglesias, 2011, Redclift 2013a, 2013b, Sigona 2016). Instead, people with ineffective nationality quite often find themselves locked in a complex legal limbo. My paper demonstrates how people in the de facto stateless situation can draw on the legal-technical nature of de jure statelessness to claim protection for their rights in a specific socio-legal context of post-Soviet Russia. A strategic use of the human rights protections embedded in de jure statelessness can be extended to people in de facto stateless situations, thereby testify to a legally productive relationship between these two forms of statelessness. What follows from nuancing the relationship between de jure and de facto statelessness is a somewhat bolder response to a question originally posed by Katja Swider (2017) ‘Why end statelessness’? When in 2014, UNHCR launched its ten-year #IBelong Campaign to end statelessness by 2024 (UNHCR, 2014), some researchers actually questioned whether the elimination of statelessness as a policy goal should be pursued over protecting the rights (including human rights) of stateless persons (Swider, 2017: 191, also Bloom, Tonkiss, & Cole, 2017). Confusing the protection of stateless persons with the reduction of statelessness, and treating citizenship as a gateway to human rights may result in a regime that forces stateless people to take up a specific nationality even if that comes with 9