Moscow is pressuring locals to obtain a Russian passport by requiring car owners to purchase Russian car liability insurance, Ukraine’s Center of National Resistance said. 

In its Saturday update, the center said getting the mandatory motor third-party liability insurance, known as OSAGO in Russia, could only be done with a Russian passport, and failure to do so in occupied territories could result in rights restrictions or potential confiscation of vehicles. 

The center called it “another element of pressure on local residents.”

“From January 2025, all car owners in the temporarily occupied territories must have Russian civil liability insurance.

“In Russia, this document is called OSAGO. However, to obtain it, you need to have an occupier passport. Thus, we have another element of pressure on local residents,” the update says.

“In the absence of Russian-style insurance, the occupiers threaten [locals] with various measures: from deprivation of rights to confiscation of transport,” it added. 

In November 2023, Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets told Kyiv Post that those coerced into getting a Russian passport to sustain themselves in occupied territories is not considered a crime by Kyiv unless there are signs of collaborative activities with the occupation regimes. 

It is believed that an estimated 130,000 Ukrainians have returned to their homes in the Russian-occupied Donbas territories in the last year due to economic hardships experienced in Kyiv-controlled areas.

Russia announced the annexation of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in October 2022 after holding what it called referendums in occupied areas of Ukraine, even though it had not occupied all of the four regional territories at the time. 

At the time of publication, Moscow controls nearly all of the Luhansk region and is pressing toward remaining key hubs under Kyiv’s control in the Donetsk region. 

Kyiv and Western governments said the votes breached international law and ruled them as illegitimate and non-representative.