Russia before Euromaidan in Ukraine called Crimea its own. A photo

The Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a snapshot of a Russian citizen’s passport issued in 2013, in which Crimea was listed as part of the Russian Federation.

The photo of the document with which the Russian applied to the Lithuanian consulate in Kaliningrad for permission to travel through the EU territory was published by the Lithuanian office on Twitter.

Photo: @LT_MFA_Stratcom

According to the passport issued on December 24, 2013 in the Kaliningrad region, the man was born in 1992 in Crimea, which for some reason is listed as “Republic of Crimea, Russia.” Thus, already during the Euromaidan in Ukraine, the Russian Federation actually considered the peninsula to be its own.

“This passport is a blatant demonstration of Russia's official position regarding the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine even before the illegal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. It was issued just a week after the meeting between Yanukovych and Putin in Moscow, when the latter promised Ukraine support and a loan in the amount of fifteen billion dollars,” the Lithuanian department commented on the document, European Pravda reports.

It is also reported that the owner of this document was denied permission to enter the EU.

“A Russian citizen contacted our consulate with a request to issue him a simplified transit document. The decision of our consulate was to refuse to issue a simplified transit document, and yesterday this citizen was informed about this,” Lithuanian Foreign Ministry press attaché Kestutis Vaskelyavičius told BNS.

“Under European Union law, a facilitated transit document is equivalent to a Schengen transit visa, and under the Visa Code there is a legal basis for refusing to issue a Schengen visa if there are reasonable doubts about the authenticity of the document provided or the reliability of its contents,” he added .