A law signed on 4 August lets Moscow strip its critics abroad of banking, property and consular services without formally revoking their citizenship. European states, meanwhile, are tightening the routes those same people use to stay. Two policies, one population caught between them.

By Aalimi Nation · Opinion/ aljazeera

On 4 August, President Vladimir Putin signed legislation formally titled "On Temporary Restrictive Measures Against Persons Located Outside the Russian Federation and Evading the Execution of Punishment." It took effect the day it was published. The State Duma had passed it on 22 July and the Federation Council two days later.

The mechanism is administrative rather than dramatic, which is part of what makes it significant.

A person outside Russia who has been convicted — under any article of the Criminal Code, or under a set of specified administrative provisions — and who authorities determine is evading that sentence can be placed on a register maintained by the Justice Ministry. Once listed, according to reporting by The Moscow Times, Meduza and the Kyiv Independent, that person's Russian bank accounts and assets are frozen. They lose access to online banking and to Gosuslugi, the state services portal. They cannot sell or transfer real estate or vehicles, take out loans, register as self-employed, or receive certain state payments. Russian embassies and consulates will no longer issue them passports or perform most other consular functions, though they may still issue certificates confirming identity.

The administrative provisions covered include violations of the "foreign agent" rules, participation in "undesirable" organisations, "discrediting" the armed forces, calls for sanctions against Russia, and statements challenging Russia's territorial claims. These are the provisions most frequently used against journalists, activists and opposition politicians who left after February 2022.

What each side says it is doing

Moscow's stated rationale is straightforward: a state is not obliged to extend services to people it has convicted and who are avoiding sentence. Supporters argue that citizenship carries reciprocal obligations, and that a person cannot breach a country's laws while continuing to draw on its consular protection and financial system. The law includes off-ramps written into its text — the restrictions lift if a sentence is quashed, deferred or served, or if the person returns to Russia. Frozen funds may be drawn on to support close relatives inside the country without independent income, through an interagency commission, and to compensate creditors who suffer loss because a listed person cannot meet an obligation.

Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin was less procedural. Before the vote he said those who had left should think about how they would appear before a court and confess, describing them as traitors.

Critics read the design differently, and the phrase they keep returning to is not "restriction" but "deprivation."

The Russian legal advocacy group First Department (Perviy Otdel) argued that the measures amount to "the effective deprivation of citizenship," noting that the state retains jurisdiction over the person and continues to demand that they serve a sentence while withholding a substantial share of the rights citizenship normally carries. Human Rights Watch has characterised the legislation as a civic death law. The legal scholar Gleb Bogush, speaking to RFE/RL, put the mechanism this way: the strategy is not to strip citizenship but "to use it as a weapon."

Vladimir Kara-Murza, the opposition politician released in the 2024 prisoner exchange, argued that the practical effect is to leave Russians abroad "without the most basic proof of their identity."

Reporters Without Borders, which counts more than 1,500 Russian journalists who have left the country since 2022, called the law an extension of the Kremlin's transnational repression, designed to make exile more precarious.

Both readings can be assessed against the same text. The law does not revoke citizenship. It also removes, from a defined list of people, most of what citizenship does. Whether that constitutes enforcement or punishment is the question, and it is not a question the legislation itself resolves.

The legal gap

There is a technical consequence worth spelling out, because it is where the two frameworks fail to meet.

The 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness protects people who have no nationality. A person on the Justice Ministry register remains a Russian citizen on paper. They therefore fall outside the Convention's protections while lacking, in practice, the documents that citizenship is supposed to guarantee — a passport, a notarised power of attorney, a marriage or birth certificate, a certificate of no criminal record.

The historical parallel is often drawn to the 1920s, when the League of Nations created the Nansen passport for hundreds of thousands of Russians stripped of nationality after the Bolshevik Revolution. That system ended in 1942. No equivalent instrument exists for people who hold a nationality that has been rendered functionally inert.

The other half of the problem

The second half of this story concerns countries that describe themselves as opposed to the Kremlin.

Writing in Al Jazeera, the Russian-Armenian activist Arshak Makichyan — himself stripped of Russian citizenship in 2023 after protesting the war, and stateless until Armenia granted him nationality — described a parallel narrowing in Europe. He reported that humanitarian visa pathways in Germany have become extremely limited and that Germany has deported Russian military deserters to third countries; that Finland has deported more than a thousand Russians and refused more than 1,100 asylum applications since 2022; that Estonia has barred Russian citizens from buying property; that the United States placed an indefinite hold on asylum applications in December and has deported Russian asylum seekers; and that several Central Asian states have returned Russians at Moscow's request.

These figures come from an opinion piece rather than an official compilation, and readers should weigh them accordingly. But the direction of travel is not seriously disputed.

Nor is the reasoning behind it unreasonable. European governments face genuine problems: sanctions evasion, intelligence infiltration, and the difficulty of verifying claims made by nationals of a state whose own documents cannot be checked against a cooperative authority. A residency system built for peacetime is being asked to sort, at speed, between a deserter, a dissident and an agent — using paperwork issued by the government all three are supposedly fleeing.

The uncomfortable result is a policy overlap that neither side designed. Moscow restricts documents to people it deems disloyal. European states restrict status to people whose documents it cannot verify or whose nationality it treats as a risk category. The same individual can satisfy both criteria.

What would actually resolve it

Three things would narrow the gap, none of them requiring anyone to soften their view of the Russian government.

The first is a documentary instrument for people whose nationality has been rendered functionally void — a modern equivalent of the Nansen arrangement, or an agreed interpretation extending the 1961 Convention's protections to de facto as well as de jure statelessness. This is a technical question for lawyers, not a political concession.

The second is a defined pathway for military deserters and draft evaders, judged on the risk they face if returned rather than on the passport they carry. Deporting a deserter to a third country from which he may be sent onward to a Russian prison or the front line is a policy that satisfies no stated European objective.

The third is individual assessment. Security screening addresses infiltration far better than nationality-based rules do, and it does not simultaneously punish the people whose opposition to the war is the reason they are in the queue at all.

None of this settles the larger argument. A reader may reasonably conclude that Russia is entitled to enforce its own criminal judgments, or that European states are entitled to control who settles within their borders. Both propositions can be defended. What is harder to defend is the position now occupied by several hundred thousand people: nationals of a state that has withdrawn the use of their nationality, applicants in states that increasingly treat that nationality as grounds for refusal.

This article is opinion and analysis. Factual claims are attributed to the sources named. The views expressed are the writer's own.