After visa restrictions in the EU, distrust in Georgia, residence restrictions will come into force from January 27 in Kazakhstan. And in Russia, the authorities are swinging between the carrot and the stick to bring back those who left.
From our correspondent in Moscow,
Finished the facilities offered to Russian nationals in Kazakhstan. In just over a week, by decree of the authorities, they will only be entitled to a maximum of 90 days of stay in the country every 180 days. And no more question of using this well-known method called “visa run” consisting of leaving the country for a weekend to reset the counters. The counting of the 90 days will be done strictly.
Last September, after the announcement of the partial mobilization, Kazakhstan had seen the number of daily entries of Russians more than triple. Members of the Eurasian Economic Union, Kazakhstan and Russia offer their respective nationals more flexible travel and residence conditions. Even today, again according to official Kazakh figures, there are 146,000 Russians there. Only 36,000 have a temporary residence permit.
The procedure is demanding: in particular, you have to prove that you are solvent by depositing more than 4 million tenges, the local currency (about 590,000 rubles) in a bank account. After the mobilization was announced, authorities in Kazakhstan also began to require paper rather than electronic certificates of no criminal record. Finally, you have to have found a job, be enrolled in an educational institution, or open a business… In other words, it closes the door to all those young Russian men of fighting age who have been teleworking for a Russian company since the country. They will therefore have to decide: leave Kazakhstan and probably return to Russia, or try to obtain a residence permit.
In Moscow, since December, the debate among officials has been raging. Those who believe that the men who have left must be brought back to Russia are swinging between the carrot – offering a return ticket, or even an exemption from military service in sought-after sectors, such as information technology – or the stick by increasing their taxes. for example. For others, those who left were traitors anyway and will make bad soldiers.
Still, some exiled artists, widely followed on social networks for their protest messages, have seen their number of subscribers explode, while Instagram or Facebook are banned from Russia. They observe with a worried eye what is happening in Belarus: a law passed on January 5 allows the withdrawal of the passport and nationality of all those found guilty of “participation in activities of an extremist nature or who have caused harm to the interests of Belarus”. Minsk will not hesitate to create stateless people, setting a precedent that perhaps Moscow could follow.