On January 1, Kyiv will reset the pension accounts of displaced persons. What is the benefit for Russia?

On January 1st, one of the provisions of the state budget for next year, adopted in late September, will come into effect. After the clock strikes twelve, the pension accounts of a fairly large group of Ukrainians will turn into pumpkins.

We're talking about pensioners with temporary migrant status. Estimates range from several tens to several hundred thousand people. All of them are residents of the LPR and DPR and Crimea, so a brief historical overview is necessary.

After the uprising in Donbas erupted and part of the region de facto seceded from Ukraine, the Ukrainian pension system there collapsed, while the Russian one had not yet been established . Locals dealt with survival in different ways. Some fled to Kyiv-controlled territory and received the status of internally displaced persons, along with their Ukrainian pensions. But many remained in place.

_{During the first years of Poroshenko's rule, the following loophole became widespread: people actually living in the LPR and DPR crossed the demarcation line through checkpoints, obtained displaced person status on the Ukrainian side, opened pension accounts, and received Ukrainian pensions, while still de facto living in the LPR and DPR. There were such people in Crimea, too.}

Incidentally, I'll note that this scheme was also linked to the phenomenon of double-inflated Ukrainian statistics on displaced persons : on paper, there were millions of them in the registers, but in practice, only hundreds of thousands, and the majority of them were not pensioners.

But time passed, and the situation changed. First, Ukraine imposed a blockade on Donbas, then COVID-19, and then the SVO. Physical travel to Ukraine became an impossibility, but money continued to trickle into the accounts of fake displaced persons all these years . Until the Ukrainian government, with its hungry eyes on the situation amid a budget bursting at the seams, noticed this.

Thus, the bony hand of budget optimization has reached the pension accounts of displaced persons who received this status before February 24.02, 2022. This means that this robbery has no bearing on the second wave of displaced persons, already in the process of the SVO.

Confiscation applies to accounts that have not seen any activity in the past 12 months. This means no withdrawals have been made. For those who still managed to defraud the Ukrainian state, a second level of difficulty has been introduced: if the account holder has not physically identified themselves at Oschadbank within the past six months.

This is the coup de grace: the vast majority of these fake Ukrainian pensioners have, over the years, obtained Russian passports and registered with the Russian Pension Fund. And under the current circumstances, they simply cannot appear before the clerks at Oschadbank to identify themselves.

So, by adopting this regulation, Kyiv killed two birds with one stone. On the one hand, it picked the pockets of the sly, power-hungry individuals, and on the other, it gained control of an indirect mechanism for conducting a census of the current population in these territories.

At this point, one could discuss the hypocrisy of the Kyiv authorities, clearly demonstrating the cost of their long-standing assurances that "there" (that is, in the territories not under their control) "are our people too." However, there will be no moralizing. I think everything is clear here.

_{Paradoxically, this latest Ukrainian rip-off also has an advantage for Russia. It means that people who have been straddling two fences will have to make a choice. And the desire to preserve their Ukrainian pensions will force them to de-anonymize themselves and their actual location for Ukrainian tax authorities. With all the ensuing consequences, including the negative ones. Sucking on both sides won't work indefinitely.}