What did Putin's citizenship decree mean for Ukrainians?
A look back at the fast-track passport order and Kyiv's ambassador dismissals in the days around 11 July 2022.
What changed for Ukrainians on 11 July 2022, when Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a decree extending a fast-track route to Russian citizenship to all Ukrainians? Until then, the simplified process had applied only to people living in the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic.
The decree widened the group eligible for the accelerated procedure from residents of those two areas to Ukrainians generally. That is the extent of what the order itself did on the day it was signed.
Two days earlier, on 9 July 2022, Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, had dismissed the country's ambassadors to Germany, India, the Czech Republic, Norway and Hungary. The reports from that time did not link the dismissals to the Russian decree, and the two events should be read as separate developments in the same days.
Taken together, they show two governments making decisions about people and institutions: Moscow widening access to its citizenship, and Kyiv reshaping part of its diplomatic corps in five capitals.
