Russia has sent 20,000 naturalized citizens to fight in Ukraine, Investigative Committee head says

Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, said that 20,000 people who received Russian citizenship have been sent to the front lines in Ukraine.

“Our military investigative department is carrying out raids. We’ve already caught 80,000 of these Russian citizens — not only are they avoiding the front lines, they don’t even want to go to the enlistment office,” Bastrykin said at the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum, according to the state news agency TASS. “We registered them for military service, and now 20,000 of these ‘young’ Russian citizens — who, for some reason, no longer want to live in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, or Kyrgyzstan — are on the front line.”

Russian law enforcement agencies regularly conduct raids targeting migrants with Russian citizenship, handing them draft notices or taking them directly to military enlistment offices. In some cases, naturalized citizens have reportedly been pressured to sign military contracts under threat of having their citizenship revoked and being deported.

In June 2024, Bastrykin said that more than 30,000 foreign nationals who had recently acquired Russian citizenship but failed to register for military service had been “caught.” Of those, about 10,000 were sent to rear-area units to “dig trenches and build fortifications,” he said.