Revocation of Russian citizenship on grounds of a threat to national security

A Ukrainian native was deprived of her Russian citizenship which she acquired in a simplified procedure in 2013.

Since 2014, she had been working at one of the defence industry enterprises in Kurgan, where she was responsible for keeping records of classified documents.

The reason for the revocation was her extremely negative attitude towards the special military operation in Ukraine. Officers of the Russian FSB discovered the woman’s correspondence with Ukrainian nationalists. In these messages, she spoke negatively about Russians and the actions of the Russian Armed Forces in the special military operation zone, thereby discrediting Russia’s foreign policy. A photograph of a document marked ‘For official use only' was also found in her photo gallery.

Such "negative statements" are often classified under Article 207.3 of the Russian Criminal Code — the public dissemination, under the guise of reliable reports, of knowingly false information regarding the use of the Russian Armed Forces (the article on "fake news about the army").

In this case, there was apparently no "knowingly false" information in the statement, and the punishment seems more likely to have been a consequence of the opinion expressed.