Former opposition campaign head told to give up passport and leave Russia

The former chief of staff to would-be Russian presidential candidate Boris Nadezhdin has been told to surrender his Russian passport and leave the country, business daily RBC reported on Friday. 

Dmitry Kisiev told RBC that he had received a call from the Interior Ministry’s Migration Department in Moscow, demanding that he either surrender both his internal and foreign Russian passports and leave the country or register at the Sakharovo migration center.

A Ukrainian citizen until 2014 when he was automatically granted Russian citizen as a resident of Crimea following the illegal Russian annexation of the peninsula, Kisiev was informed by the FSB in July that his Russian citizenship was being withdrawn after the agency concluded that his presence in Russia “negatively affects political and social stability” and “poses a threat to national security.”

Kisiev has accused the Russian authorities of dividing people into two tiers: those who received citizenship at birth, and those who acquired it. “The latter now face constant risk. I fall into the second category, and can be deported from a country where I have family, friends and property,” Kisiev wrote.

Kisiev first attracted the attention of Russia’s intelligence agencies in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, when he spearheaded the campaign of would-be opposition candidate Boris Nadezhdin.

Despite the fact that Nadezhdin’s candidacy was ultimately rejected on a technicality, his brief campaign gained traction among a large number of opposition-minded Russians, with thousands braving freezing temperatures to add their names to a document proposing his candidacy last January. 

Kisiev unsuccessfully attempted to appeal the decision to withdraw his Russian citizenship in the courts no less than four times, Telegram news channel SOTA reported on Thursday, adding that three of the appeals had been thrown out on technical grounds, while a fourth had not even been heard by the court to which it was submitted. 

Nadezhdin has voiced his support for Kisiev, arguing that the decision to withdraw his passport sets a dangerous precedent, noting that all Soviet citizens who later became Russian citizens had acquired their citizenship in the same manner, and warning that anyone “like Dmitry, can be stripped of it”.