Past Event

Join us for the lecture “From passportization to full-scale war? Russia’s forced naturalization of Ukrainians” with visiting scholar Dr. Fabian Burkhardt. The lecture is organized by the Carl McMillan Chair in Russian Studies at the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies. The lecture will take place on Friday November 18th, from 1:00PM-2:00PM in Richcraft Hall, room 3110.

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About the event

In April 2021, Dmitrii Kozak, the deputy head of the Russian Presidential Administration, said that Russia would be forced to protect its citizens in the Donbas if the situation turned into a “massacre like in Srebrenica” committed by Ukraine. The “citizens” Kozak referred to were in fact Ukrainians whom only Russia recognized as “Russian citizens,” and Ukraine never intended to commit any “genocide.” 

The presentation sheds light on how Russia has gradually securitized citizenship and analyzes Russia’s passportization – defined as the extraterritorial naturalization of citizens of a contested territory of a neighbouring state en masse – of Ukraine’s Donbas in the period from 2019 to 2022. A specific focus of the presentation will be a citizenship constellation that we call “diminished citizenship” as a result of passportization of contested territories such as Ukraine’s Donbas. The main concepts of the project are visualized with original maps, and data are based on qualitative interviews in Russia and Ukraine, social media, and electoral results of the 2021 Duma elections. The presentation closes with a brief overview of forced naturalization of Ukrainians in occupied territories since February 24 and raises some questions about transitional justice in the future. 

About the Speaker

Fabian Burkhardt is a comparative political scientist at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS), Germany. His research interests are political institutions, such as executives and constitutions, in authoritarian regimes, with a regional focus on post-Soviet countries, in particular Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. At IOS in Regensburg, he conducts research on how digital transformation shapes post-Soviet authoritarian regimes. Since July 2020, he has been the co-editor of  Russland– and Ukraine-Analysen, and in 2022 he became editorial team member of the Russian Analytical Digest. Burkhardt received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Bremen for the thesis “ Presidential power and institutional change: A study on the presidency of the Russian Federation .” Before joining the IOS, he worked at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich), the Higher School of Economics (HSE Moscow), and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP Berlin). His research has been published in academic journals such as Post-Soviet Affairs , Europe-Asia Studies, and Russian Politics. His latest work on passportization is “Passportization, Diminished Citizenship Rights, and the Donbas Vote in Russia’s 2021 Duma Elections ” published as a TCUP Report with the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.