Hundreds of Russian women are travelling to Argentina to give birth as Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine continues for around a year.
Since the start of the Ukraine war last year in February, the South American country has experienced a boom in Russian birth tourism, the practice of travelling to another country for the purpose of giving birth and obtaining citizenship for the child, The Guardian reported.
Moreover, Russians face no visa requirements in Argentina and extending the 90-day stay issued by the country as well as applying for a residency permit was also straightforward.
Polina Cherepovitskaya, who is one of the many Russians in line at the maternity ward of a hospital in Buenos Aires said, “It was crazy, there were at least eight pregnant Russian women waiting in front of me.”
Cherepovitskaya, who gave birth this January, is one of the estimated hundreds of Russian women who gave birth in the Argentinian capital.
The sanctions on Russia and Moscow’s isolation from the west has made Argentina the go-to destination for families looking to give their children a second citizenship.
Georgy Polin, head of the consular department of the Russian Embassy in Argentina, said that 2,000-2,500 Russians moved to Argentina in 2022 and many of them were Russian women planning to give birth.
Polin said that the number could reach 10,000 this year.
Many of the parents have now planned to stay in Buenos Aires and apply for Argentinian citizenship for themselves, a process that is simplified because they are now the parents of an Argentinian child.
One of the advantages of an Argentinian passport was that the citizens could make short-term trips to 171 countries without a visa, including the EU, the UK and Japan. Moreover, the process of obtaining a long-term US visa was “not very difficult”, Eva Pekurova, who runs an agency that arranges travel documents for Russian parents said.
Before the Ukraine war, Russians could go visa-free to about 80 countries. However, after Putin sent his troops to Ukraine, many European nations made it almost impossible for Russians to visit, while month-long waiting lines for visas have formed at western consulates in Moscow.
The foreign parents of an Argentina-born baby have a relatively easy pathway to Argentinian citizenship, which can be arranged in less than two years.
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