“Generally, Russia is a country that denies its own citizenship, and no matter its new law says that it will grant a Russian citizenship in a simplified procedure to people living in Russia during the period of Russian Empire, pre-Soviet and the Soviet, to those who are Russian native speakers, no matter they require giving up with other citizenship and receiving Russian citizenship, the practice, I think, definitely shows that we would have a lot of people with dual citizenship. This, in turn, has a lot of risks,” said the “Heritage” party MP Stepan Safaryan in the interview with Aravot.am.
Recall that recently Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law on facilitating granting Russian citizenship. The law applies to those persons who are fluent in Russian and have lived in the USSR or the Russian Empire, in the territories of modern Russia. To our question of what risks we are talking about when the Constitution allows dual citizenship, Stepan Safaryan, first, noted that Russia is considered a country denying dual citizenship, however, practically having people with dual citizenship in Armenia, Ukraine or any other country, inevitably problems will emerge. Then, Stepan Safaryan is convinced that we should have long ago realized that Russia is speculating the existence of its citizens in this-or-that area, even for flagrant interventions, like, for instances, it did in the Crimea or is doing now in South-East of Ukraine.
“Therefore, Russian citizens, wittingly or unwittingly, are becoming walking mines in the territory of other state. The danger comes not so much from them, but from the Russian intervention, the legitimization base of which serves the very Russian citizen, whom the Russian army is protecting,” said our interlocutor, adding that in his opinion the bill is too much concerning not only in the sense that, willy-nilly, an objective and subjective temptation will arise in the post-Soviet countries to acquire Russian citizenship, because people are going for migrant work, and it is natural that they would like to be secure, and have less problems, but also in the sense of demography and strategy.
Nelly GRIGORYAN
