21 March 2026
A bill has been introduced to the Duma allowing the President to use military force against other countries on the pretext of ‘No Russians left behind’.
By Leonid Nikitinsky
Source: Novaya gazeta
The application of military force always revels in being unexpected. Like a bolt from the blue, the Government rushed bill No. 1181659-8 into the Duma that proposes allowing the President of the Russian Federation to legally use the Russian armed forces to protect Russian citizens ‘arrested, detained or subjected to criminal or other prosecutions’ abroad.
This is not just a band of Duma Deputies from somewhere or the legislature of a federal subject; this is the Government – bill No. 1181659-8 was signed by the Prime Minister, Mikhail Mishustin. So its passage into law is virtually guaranteed ‘as a matter of urgency’, to quote Duma Speaker, Vyacheslav Volodin.
The bill is to amend two articles of currently-existing legislation: Article 13 of Federal Law No. 138 (entitled On Citizenship of the Russian Federation) passed on 28 April 2023 and Federal Law No.61, (entitled On Defence) passed on 31 May 1996. The aim in adopting these amendments into law is to provide Russia with a new casus belli. The United Nations Charter does not provide this since such issues are supposed to be solved diplomatically.
The bill doesn’t talk about ‘fellow countrymen,’ but citizens of the Russian Federation, including people who could have obtained Russian passports in undeclared republics that formed after the fall of the USSR. Obviously, these amendments are not directed at large-scale prosecutions but targeted cases. The bill does not even require the President to gain the approval of the Federation Council.
Amendments are introduced into legislation when situations happen repeatedly in practice that require addressing by changing current law. The bill’s explanatory note, though, does not state any specific recent examples of this.
The bill was introduced so unexpectedly and is, despite its brevity, so convoluted that Speaker Volodin managed to inaccurately convey its contents on the Duma website. Let’s compare that with the language in the bill.
Volodin stated that this bill relates to Russians ‘arrested, detained or subjected to criminal or other prosecutions by order of foreign courts or international judicial bodies of which Russia is not a member.’
The bill, though, applies to citizens of the Russian Federation ‘who are arrested (or detained) or being subjected to criminal or other prosecutions in execution of decisions made by foreign courts exercising authority in the sphere of criminal procedure granted to them by other foreign states without the participation of the Russian Federation and/or international judicial bodies whose authority is not based on an international agreement with the Russian Federation or a resolution of the UN Security Council.
The bill is for situations where a Russian citizen has been arrested in one state and another state, with whom Russia has no extradition agreement, is demanding they be transported to their jurisdiction. (Russia has torn up nearly all such agreements with European countries recently.)
A typical example of this is the ongoing case related to the extradition of the Russian archaeologist Aleksandr Butyagin from Poland to Ukraine where he is charged with conducting illegal excavations in Crimea. It would seem this story was the trigger for this bill, but in such a case the cause and effect are too disproportionate in scale.
It is also possible that this bill will be adopted as a stop-gap measure; given the continuing Special Military Operation* in Ukraine, the Russian armed forces are likely to be insufficient to attack other countries.
From Novaya gazeta‘s editors: We mustn’t forget either the constant and ever more common casus belli from the Russian oil tankers and the arrests of their crew members. In this regard we must heed the chairman of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, who promised military escorts for oil tankers literally a few days ago.
* The Russian Government-approved and adopted term for the war in Ukraine, beginning with the invasion in February 2022. Using words such as ‘war’ or ‘invasion’ to describe the war in Russia is now a criminal offence, since ‘discrediting the [Russian] army’ is contradictory to Articles 280 and 207 of the Russian Criminal Code. The translator has chosen to keep the original term to demonstrate how legislation in Russia suppresses opposition to the war. (Trans.)
Translated by Oscar Seecharan
