Russia’s FSB moves to eliminate the border zone with annexed Ukraine, despite lack of control over claimed regions
In the Rostov and Voronezh regions, as well as in annexed Crimea, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) is dismantling the border zone that separates Russia from Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. The independent Russian investigative outlet Agentstvo reported the move, citing the FSB’s orders.
In those documents (1 and 2), the FSB proposed nullifying its own earlier departmental orders on border zones — orders that had required travelers heading to the annexed territories to undergo checks as if crossing an international border.
The FSB attributed the decision to Russia’s completed annexation of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and the Kherson region. In Crimea, the border zone will remain “within the boundaries of the Black Sea islands belonging to the Russian Federation.”
Russia annexed Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions in 2022, having already annexed Crimea in 2014. Russian forces, however, still do not fully control any of the four regions — only the Luhansk region has been almost entirely seized.
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