Based judo move.
“Which way, Ukraine man?”
AP:
As Russian missiles struck a key Ukrainian city, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree Monday expanding a fast-track procedure of obtaining Russian citizenship available to all Ukrainians, yet another effort to expand Moscow’s influence in war-torn Ukraine.
Until recently, only residents of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, as well as residents of the southern Zaporizhzhia and the Kherson regions, large parts of which are now under Russian control, were eligible to apply for the simplified passport procedure.
Ukrainian officials haven’t yet reacted to Putin’s announcement. The decree Monday also applies for any stateless residents currently in Ukraine.
Between 2019, when the procedure was first introduced for the residents of Donetsk and Luhansk, and this year, more than 720,000 people living in the rebel-held areas in the two regions — about 18% of the population – have received Russian passports.
In late May, three months after Russia invaded Ukraine, the fast-track procedure was also offered to residents of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions and a month ago, the first Russian passports were reportedly handed out there.
The Russian passport move appears to be part of Putin’s strategy, which could also involve annexation of territory into the Russian Federation. The Russian president set the stage for such moves even before the invasion, writing an essay last summer claiming Russians and Ukrainians are one people and attempting to diminish the legitimacy of Ukraine as an independent nation.
Yeah, we’re definitely going to be seeing some serious annexing.
But this is more than that – this puts every “Ukraine” person in a position where they have to question their identity, and the value of the US-enforced fake “Ukraine” identity. For hundreds of years, Ukrainians were Russian, and “Ukraine language” was a bastardized field peasant version of Russian using Polish words and strange grammar. It was basically Russian ebonics, and creole.
So, all of these people now have the option of just embracing Russian identity, becoming Russian again, and forgetting about this whole stupid experiment in independence, which is just an artifact of the collapse of the USSR.
(I guess people in Galicia have some claim to being linguistically diverse enough that they can claim some kind of separate national identity – but what for? So they can go do child anal, gender pronouns, and mass immigration with the EU and NATO?)
I’ve been saying since 2014 that Putin should just offer full citizenship to everyone in the Ukraine, and the basic response was that there were economic considerations preventing that. No, it’s possible that he was just waiting for the right time to make the move. It’s also possible that the great economic benefits to Russia caused by US sanctions made this move more obvious.
Either way – in this conflict, Putin has proved himself again and again to be the genius I knew he was, doing all of the things that I would have done.
This is an old Roman Empire style move, too.
Every single “Ukraine” person is now asking “so wait, what the hell are we fighting for here, exactly? Russia has a good economy, and they’re not the one forcing war on us.”
Well I heard Mr. Zelensky sing about her
Well I heard ol’ Greenberg put her down
Well I hope Zelensky will remember
A Slavic man don’t need him around anyhow.