Moscow:

Russia has finished issuing passports to Ukrainians living in parts of the country seized by Moscow’s army, officials said on Wednesday — a process slammed by Kyiv as an illegal attempt to scrub the area of its Ukrainian identity.

Since launching its full-scale military offensive in February 2022, Moscow has pushed Ukrainians that live in the south and east of the country to become Russian citizens.

Those who refuse face restrictions on their movement and difficulties accessing public services, like healthcare and education provided by the Russian-installed authorities. Ukrainians who do not secure a Russian passport are classified as foreign citizens.

“Last year, the passportisation of residents living in the liberated areas of the Lugansk and Donetsk republics (and) Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, was virtually fully completed,” President Vladimir Putin told a meeting of interior ministry officials in Moscow.

Russia claimed in 2022 to have annexed those four regions, despite not having full control over them.

Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev said that 3.5 million passports had been handed out in total.

Even before its full-scale offensive, Russia was offering easy citizenship to residents of parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Lugansk regions that were under the control of Moscow-backed separatists.

Kyiv has called the process “illegal” and a “gross violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty”.

It has also been slammed by Western governments and rights groups, while the European Union does not accept the passports as legitimate travel documents.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)