Russia sent 10,000 naturalized citizens to war in Ukraine, says top investigator

A high-ranking official of the Federal Police said On Thursday, Russia said it had sent 10,000 recently naturalized citizens to fight in Ukraine to combat Moscow’s labor shortage.

Male migrants who obtain Russian citizenship are legally obliged to register with the Russian military and may be called up for army service in case of mobilization.

“We have begun to implement constitutional and legal provisions and have arrested more than 30,000 people who had obtained citizenship but refused to register with the military,” said Alexander Bastrykin, Chairman of the Russian Investigative Committee.

“About 10,000 of them were sent to the area of ​​the special military operation,” he said at a legal forum in St. Petersburg, using the Kremlin’s preferred term for the invasion of Ukraine.

Bastrykin described The military registration and deployment was a “trick to make the migrants slowly begin to leave Russia.”

A video of the session of the legal forum devoted to migration policy was broadcast live and the Ostorozhno Novosti news channel shared Bastrykin’s remarks.

The official said the 10,000 naturalized citizens sent to Ukraine “dug trenches and built fortifications,” suggesting they were not sent on combat missions.

Bastrykin added that three million migrants arrived in Moscow and St. Petersburg alone in the first four months of 2024 and called for stricter laws to limit these numbers.