"More than 70,000 people with wrongly documented Russian passports or without valid documents certifying identity and nationality, reside in Russia at present," Romodanovsky said at a session of the Federal Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament.
Romodanovsky said these people were former Soviet citizens who stayed in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union and for unknown reasons did not follow official procedures for obtaining citizenship.
The migration service chief said these people are not at fault and blamed the chaos during the 1990s for their failure to gain citizenship. He urged members of parliament to focus their attention on legal initiatives to solve the problem.
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