Russian journalist and blogger Alexander Nevzorov announced his desire to obtain Ukrainian citizenship.

" Without many words. Everything is very simple. What is the war in Ukraine? It is a sin. There is a criminal and a victim of a crime. Criminal-Russia. Victim-Ukraine. It's impossible to deny or disprove. It is a fact. Well, then everyone makes his choice: help the criminal or save his victim.. I take the side of the victim. And I am very grateful to those exhausted, desperate, bloodied people of Ukraine who allowed me to take a place among them, ”he wrote in his Telegram.

The day before, Interior Minister Advisor Anton Gerashchenko said that President Volodymyr Zelensky had already signed a decree on granting Ukrainian citizenship to Oleksandr Nevzorov and his wife Lydia, although the corresponding document has not yet been published on the President's website..

“Alexander Nevzorov and his wife Lydia Nevzorova were granted citizenship of Ukraine by the Decree of President Volodymyr Zelensky for outstanding services to our country,” Gerashchenko said..

“Yes, I absolutely confirm such information,” Viktor Andrusov, another adviser to the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, said in his turn in a commentary to BBC News Ukraine..

Alexander Nevzorov is a former well-known Russian journalist and TV presenter who covered the war in Chechnya. True, he has an ambiguous reputation, because while working on the ORT television channel, which in the 1990s was controlled by the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, the journalist justified the actions of the Soviet security forces in the Baltic countries, although he later changed his views.

Also in 2012, in the presidential elections in Russia, Nevzorov was even a confidant of Putin.

Over the past few years, on his YouTube channel, he has sharply criticized the Russian authorities and the actions of the Russian army..

In 2015, after the annexation of Crimea and hostilities in the Donbass, Nevzorov declared: “I have no nationality.

With the Russians, I wrote a statement about the withdrawal after the Ukrainian events. I am a teetotaler, an unbeliever, and I don’t know how to play the balalaika - what kind of Russian am I?

On March 22, 2022, the Russian Investigative Committee opened a case against Nevzorov for discrediting the armed forces of the Russian Federation. The reason was the publication by Nevzorov in social networks of information about the shelling of a maternity hospital in Mariupol by Russia. After that, he was put on the wanted list in Russia..