A crowd of protesters, mostly Donbas war veterans and right-wing activists, gathered in front of the Verkhovna Rada on the morning of Oct. 2 to rally for simplifying the procedure to grant Ukrainian citizenship to foreign volunteers fighting Russian-backed forces in the Donbas.
Since Russia’s invasion of the region in 2014, thousands of foreigners — mostly from Russia, Belarus, and Western European and Scandinavian countries — have joined Ukrainian volunteer forces or army formations to fight to free the country’s embattled east.
Their service alongside Ukrainian forces brought many of them into conflict with the law in their own countries. Some of the foreign fighters face imprisonment should they go home.
But the Ukrainian authorities appear in no rush to grant Ukrainian citizenship to the foreign volunteers applying for it. Over the past four years of war, very few foreign fighters have received Ukrainian passports. As a result, thousands of them remain in Ukraine illegally. With their legal period of stay in Ukraine expired months — if not years — ago, they are trapped in bureaucratic limbo.
Efforts to build a legal foundation to kick-start their citizenship process has dragged on for years with few tangible results.
However, in response to protests, on Oct. 2, the Ukrainian parliament eventually passed a bill simplifying the procedure for granting citizenship to foreign fighters in its first reading.
