A court investigator in Moscow stated on Monday that she could not clarify why Ilya Yashin, an opposition activist living in exile, was recently identified in official paperwork as a “stateless person.”

Yashin, a former member of the Moscow city council and a vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin, declared last week that Russian authorities had effectively revoked his citizenship, based on legal documents submitted by his attorney that labeled him as stateless and prohibited from returning to Russia.

During court proceedings, however, investigator Darya Kurilova affirmed that Yashin is still a Russian citizen, describing the earlier classification as perplexing.

“I can’t provide an explanation,” she was reported saying by the news outlet Mediazona. “There is no indication that his citizenship has been annulled. It simply states [stateless person]. Just two lines.”

Yashin’s attorney, Mikhail Biryukov, condemned the designation as an “insurmountable contradiction” and called upon the court to summon officials from the Interior Ministry to clarify the situation. A judge indicated that she would instead seek further information from the ministry’s information center.

According to the Russian Constitution, citizenship cannot be revoked; however, some lawmakers have advocated for such measures against “traitors” since the onset of the Ukraine invasion in 2022.

Yashin, who was an ally of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, has been residing in Germany since his release in a prisoner exchange between Russia and Western nations last August.