Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration Dmitry Kuleba announced that the dual citizenship policy meets the interests of Ukraine, excluding the dual citizenship with Russia.
Vice Prime Minister’s statement that came to be practically the first official statement of the new authorities on the issue of dual citizenship perfectly echoes the position of the previous authorities.
Earlier, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky made a number of statements on granting Ukrainian citizenship to nationals of other states, however, they were phrased differently. Immediately after he won the presidential election, Zelensky said that Ukraine will “grant Ukrainian citizenship to representatives of all nations suffering from authoritarian and corrupt regimes, primarily Russians, who today suffer the most.” This idea was then harshly criticized by Pyotr Poroshenko, then incumbent president. He said that he refused “to understand that anyone would grant the sacred Ukrainian citizenship to Russians.” In July, Zelensky instructed the Foreign Ministry to devise a mechanism of issuing Ukrainian citizenship as a second one for ethnic Ukrainians “from friendly countries looking to join the development of their historic native land.”
Currently, the Ukrainian legislation does not recognize foreign citizenships that Ukrainians hold, while voluntarily receiving a citizenship of another country is seen as grounds to strip a person of the Ukrainian passport. At the same time, the direct ban on dual citizenship is only applied to public officials. In reality, many ethnic minority representatives have been eagerly accepting passports of other countries in the past few years.
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