Aggressors may mass-impose their citizenship and issue the metropole's state-standard documents to residents of occupied territories. Coercing the Indigenous people into obtaining new passports under threat of losing basic rights, medical care, or property allows the colonizer to artificially integrate the population into its legal framework, convert them into the status of its own subjects, and justify the continued retention of the region as the "protection of its citizens."
The 1894 "Regulation on Residence Permits" enshrined estate inequality: nobles, officials and merchants received passport books of unlimited duration, while highlanders ascribed to village communities received five-year books or short-term passports and bilets (written passes) for absence[1]. Historian Z. Kh. Ibragimova states the regime's effect from the oblast's records: "Terek highlanders, should they appear beyond the Kuban or in other parts of the Russian Empire without passports, were considered vagrants and malefactors and were punished as such"; she also writes: "The passport system served the administration of the Terek oblast as a favourite means of constraining even persons well known to it"[1]. Inside the oblast a regime of absences operated: leave of up to a month was granted by the village elder, for a longer term - by the okrug head; unauthorized absence was punished by fine, arrest or public works, and a highlander could not move from one community to another without the consent of two village communities - the one he was leaving and the one he was joining[2].
Coercing residents of the occupied territories into taking Russian passports: "the policy of mass conferral of Russian citizenship to residents of occupied areas of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions exacerbated the coercive environment there," and "those who refused Russian passports were denied access to public services, notably social security, healthcare, and education, and risked unemployment" and "faced a heightened risk of arbitrary detention when crossing checkpoints"[3].