Asylum Seekers

Kazakh authorities have granted Russia’s request to extradite activist Yulia Yemelyanova, a former employee of the late Alexei Navalny’s Petersburg office. According to the Russian opposition-in-exile’s Anti-War Committee, Kazakhstan violated its own protocols in making the decision to extradite Yemelyanova, as the Russian activist’s application for asylum is still under review in the country.

This past October, Kazakhstan’s Prosecutor General’s Office had guaranteed that extradition requests would not be considered until all administrative procedures related to obtaining asylum were completed. Yemelyanova’s defense intends to appeal the extradition decision to the country’s Supreme Court.

Yemelyanova was detained on Aug. 31, 2025, at Almaty airport while in transit to a third country. She has been held in pretrial detention ever since. In Russia, she is being prosecuted for theft (Part 2, Article 158 of the Criminal Code) in connection with a 2021 incident in which she allegedly stole a mobile phone from a taxi driver. Yemelyanova’s defense calls the case fabricated. It was sent to court in July 2022, by which time the activist had already left Russia.

Yemelyanova is the fourth Russian asylum seeker since late January to be handed a deportation decision from Kazakh officials. The others are Chechen Mansur Movlaev, an open critic of Ramzan Kadyrov; Crimean resident Oleksandr Kachkurkin, who is facing treason charges in Russia; and Yevgeny Korobov, an officer who deserted from the Russian army.

Source: “Kazakhstan moves to extradite former employee of Navalny’s St. Petersburg office to Russia,” The Insider, 11 February 2026

Dmytro Kulyk with his wife Oksana and daughter Elina. Source: Daily Beast

A Ukrainian dad escaped Vladimir Putin’s drone and missile attacks back home only to be grabbed by a band of ICE stooges in a Walmart parking lot in Minneapolis.

“I hoped I would find peace in America. I’ve done everything the government required, I don’t understand why I am behind bars,” Dmytro Kulyk told the Daily Beast from the Kandiyohi County Jail in Willmar, Minnesota.

The 39-year-old father was getting a pickup order at a Walmart in Maple Grove when he found himself surrounded by immigration agents last month. He’d been working as a delivery driver to make ends meet, while also supporting his family by doing roofing work.

Kulyk legally entered the U.S. in late 2023 along with his wife, 38, and daughter, who’s now 5. The family was sponsored by U.S. citizens as part of the Uniting 4 Ukraine program, a humanitarian program set up in April 2022 to allow Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war to live and work in the U.S. on “parole.”

Once the initial two-year parole period expires, entrants can file for re-parole to remain in the country longer. That’s exactly what Kulyk says he did. His wife and daughter’s applications were approved. But his remained pending.

He said he was putting groceries in his car on Jan. 1 when he was approached by three ICE agents.

“I explained to the ICE officers that the war was killing people, that my wife had a disability, that it was violence, terrorism which we had escaped from but one of them began to laugh,” Kulyk told The Daily Beast. “I asked why he was laughing and I was told that he was pro-Russian, wanted Russia to win the war.”

DHS and ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

He can’t understand why he’s been treated like a criminal. He did everything by the book, he says–paying taxes and filing his immigration paperwork on time, working multiple jobs to take care of his family. He had no criminal record to speak of.

His immigration attorney, Julia Bikbova, suggested his re-parole application may have intentionally been stalled to provide immigration authorities with a pretext to deport him.

“Our government, our Homeland Security, promised Ukrainians to protect them during the war. There are approximately 280,000 Ukrainians on U4U, Uniting for Ukraine program in the United States, including the Kulyk family,” she told the Daily Beast.

“My client did everything the government required him to do: on June 5 he applied for the re-parole and his wife paid $2,040 of fees for her and child’s granted applications. His wife and daughter have recently received their re-paroles but he has not, his application is pending.

“ICE detained him as ‘illegal’ and began deportation proceedings: This is a sick way of forcing a man with a clean criminal record to become unlawful in the U.S. by delaying the review of his application, which the very same authority had requested to file.”

Kulyk is now terrified he’ll be sent to the frontlines to fight Vladimir Putin’s troops if he is deported back home. He and his family endured relentless Russian attacks before finally deciding to flee their home in the Odesa region in 2023. When they saw ruins on their own street in Chornomorsk, they called their friends in Texas and asked for help, leading to their enrollment in the U4U program thanks to having U.S. citizens as sponsors.

Kulyk now can’t stop worrying about his wife, Oksana, and daughter, Elina.

“I am worried they can drag my wife and kid out of our home,” he told The Daily Beast, adding that he wanted to appeal directly to American authorities to make them understand he’d done nothing wrong.

“Please hear me: I came to America to escape the war, to pray in church and work hard. But now my heartbroken and sick wife has lost over 10 pounds since ICE arrested me on January 1. She’s been panicking, and my little daughter has been crying without me every night – this is unjust,” he said.

Oksana says she’s been too “terrified and lost” to leave home while her husband is locked up, afraid that immigration agents might return for the rest of the family.

“I am too scared to drive my 5-year-old daughter to school in my husband’s car. I’m terrified ICE will detain me and our daughter will end up alone,” she told The Daily Beast. “This is just as scary as the war in Ukraine, except now we don’t have Dmytro with us. Our daughter Elina cries herself to sleep with her cat plushie. She says the toy is daddy.”

Most Ukrainian refugees are women and children but some men have also left the country for various reasons. Kulyk was granted a permit to leave in order to care for a family member with a medical condition.

But Kulyk is not the only Ukrainian refugee to be swept up in the Trump administration’s controversial immigration crackdown.

Nearly 1,000 miles away, in Philadelphia, Zhanna was poring over messages in a group chat of 349 other refugees called “Ukrainians in Detention.” She joined the group last month, when her friends Andrii and Yaroslav ended up in detention. Although Bartosh has legal Temporary Protected Status, she stopped going to the office and now works from home.

“ICE rounds up men who buy tools or work in construction, so every day I call my husband, a construction worker, to check if he is OK. Even when the war started in Ukraine and we had to escape abroad, the same morning I wasn’t as stressed as I am now,” she told the Daily Beast. “In our chat I read that all arrestees are men, that at least five of them have signed up for self-deportation… but where is there to go now? Europe is also deporting Ukrainians. Our TPS is good until October but we want to understand, are we really legal in the United States, or is it time to pack up our suitcases again?”

Immigration attorneys count about 300 cases of detained Ukrainians across the United States and up to 150 refugees deported to Ukraine, Bikbova said.

“Most of the arrested Ukrainians are men, the majority of them have a clean criminal record but as we see in Kulyk’s case, they are equated to people who jumped the border, broke the law,” attorney Bikbova told the Daily Beast. “Behind every deported man, there are crying women and children, left without support. For some mysterious reason, we see male Ukrainian refugees being arrested and put on airplanes. If he gets deported, my client Kulyk will most certainly go to the front.”

Trump’s administration has also been deporting Russian asylum seekers. According to a report by Current Times, more than 50,000 Russians have fled the war and political repression to the U.S. since February 2022. Journalist Ilya Azar has been covering the deportations for Novaya Gazeta.

“They send out 40-60 people on each plane. There have been five airplanes,” Azar told the Daily Beast on Tuesday. The deportation planes transit to Russia through Egypt, and Russian security services meet the deported citizens. Azar’s report noted that “all men received draft notices” upon their arrival in December.

Source: Anna Nemtsova, “Laughing ICE Goons Seize Dad Who Fled Ukraine War at Walmart,” Daily Beast, 12 February 2026. The emphasis, above, is mine. \\\\\TRR

German authorities last week denied asylum to 47-year-old engineer Georgy Avaliani, who deserted from the front line in 2022. His wife and two children were rejected alongside him.

“There is no reason to believe that, upon returning to the Russian Federation, they would face a high probability of persecution or serious harm,” wrote an official from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), despite Avaliani’s account of being tortured after fleeing the front.

Mediazona has reviewed BAMF decisions in Avaliani’s case and those of other deserters, discovering that officials are producing boilerplate documents that repeat one another almost word for word. In justifying the refusals, the German agency argues, for instance, that mobilisation in Russia was intended to “strengthen the armed forces” rather than repress dissent, and therefore cannot be considered political persecution. They further say that mobilisation has effectively ended because Vladimir Putin announced it—verbally.

When describing potential punishments for deserters, officials cite not the criminal code but an administrative article regarding failure to comply with military registration duties. They even specify that the maximum penalty is a fine of €302.

Most notably, in every decision examined, BAMF cites Mediazona’s own article from 2023, “Evading > refusing > fleeing. A year of mobilization in Russia through trials and verdicts”, as evidence that mobilised men face little more than a fine. That article noted that, at the time of publication, failing to respond to a summons did not yet carry a heavy penalty. While the situation has since changed—an eventuality the original article warned about—the original reference remains in the German files.

Relying on information from that article is also fundamentally flawed because BAMF applies it to people already wanted under serious criminal charges for desertion or abandoning their unit. In its rulings, the agency ignores the severity of these consequences, lumping deserters in with those who simply left Russia when mobilisation was first announced. This is exactly what happened to Georgy Avaliani.

A year in a refugee camp

Avaliani, an engineer, arrived in Germany with his wife, Oksana, and their two children on January 26, 2025. By then Georgy, who was drafted shortly after mobilisation began and later deserted, had been on a federal wanted list for over six months.

The family was granted asylum-seeker status without an initial investigation into the specifics of their escape. Like other applicants, they were placed in temporary housing: a small portacabin with two bunk beds at the former Tempelhof airport site. Their journey to Germany had been arduous. On January 18, Georgy, who had managed to leave Russia before his name appeared on the wanted list, met his wife and children in Bosnia. From there, they travelled to the Croatian border and requested asylum.

In Croatia, the asylum process is largely a formality; in practice, obtaining protection there is nearly impossible. Consequently, many migrants use it only as an entry point into the EU before heading to countries with functioning reception systems. The Avalianis did the same. After a preliminary registration in Croatia, they spent a week travelling to Berlin.

For nearly a year, the family was cramped in a camp with 2,000 other applicants. Finally, just before the start of 2026, they were moved to a hostel in western Berlin. But Georgy’s hopes of integration (he had been diligently learning German and hoped to return to engineering) were soon shuttered. On January 16, just two weeks after their move, BAMF rejected the entire family’s asylum claim.

Avaliani intends to appeal. If he fails, the family must leave Germany within 30 days or face deportation to Russia, where Georgy faces up to 10 years in prison for abandoning his unit during a period of mobilisation. Despite having clear evidence of persecution, the German authorities have ignored his claims.

The two escapes of Private Avaliani

Before the war, Georgy Avaliani was a well-paid engineer at the Moscow water utility, Mosvodokanal. He had no plans to leave Russia. Shortly before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he even enrolled in a seminary to pursue a religious education.

Georgy had never served in the army due to a heart condition. However, following the “partial mobilisation” announcement, he received a summons on October 6, 2022. At the time, his three children were minors; by law, as the father of a large family, he should have been exempt. The couple tried to contest the draft through the military enlistment office and the prosecutor’s office but failed. Georgy chose not to go into hiding, unwilling to abandon his family.

After a medical commission in November, he was sent to a training camp in the Moscow region and then to the occupied Svatove district of the Luhansk region. His unit was stationed in the village of Novoselivske, 20 km from the front line. After a few days, noticing the chaos within the unit, Avaliani decided to slip away, gambling that no one would notice his absence. He reached a nearby road and hitched a ride to the village of Troitske, a gathering point for mobilised men.

Part of a local hospital had been turned into a shelter for soldiers with nowhere else to go—some had lost their units, others were waiting to withdraw their pay, and some were recovering from wounds.

While staying there, Georgy met another mobilised soldier. They shared the same grim impression of the front and a desperate desire to return home. They found three others who felt the same and hired a taxi driver to take them to a spot where they could cross the border on foot.

After the driver dropped them off, the group split up. Along the way, Avaliani and his companion heard a helicopter. Georgy later told journalists and BAMF officials that the second group had been gunned down from the air. While there is no independent confirmation of this, Avaliani and the other man survived only to be detained in an abandoned village.

There is little doubt Georgy made this journey on foot; “Goodbye to Arms”, a project that assists deserters, thoroughly verified his route. Alexei Alshansky, a coordinator for the organisation, says the helicopter story is the only detail rights activists have been unable to confirm.

Following his capture, Avaliani was thrown into “a basement” for 10 days. He says he was beaten repeatedly and subjected to mock executions. Mediazona has previously reported on this location, known as the Zaitsevo Centre for the Detention of Servicemen, based on the testimony of another deserter, Sergei Savchenko. Volunteers from “Goodbye to Arms” identified the site in the occupied village of Rassypne by comparing testimonies with video footage.

From the basement, Georgy was sent to an assault unit. Two days later, an ammunition dump near their position exploded. Avaliani suffered a concussion and a heart attack. He was sent to a distribution point where he befriended the doctor issuing referrals. The medic sent him to a hospital inside Russia, hinting that he could just as easily head straight for Moscow instead of the ward.

Avaliani did exactly that. After reuniting with his family, he hid at a dacha in the Tula region. Occasionally, he ventured to Lyubertsy for medical treatment. As time passed he grew less cautious, but in mid-February 2024 military police arrested him outside his home.

He was sent to Kaliningrad in western Russia, the permanent base of his unit, to await his fate. When a commander learned of Georgy’s engineering background, he set him to work renovating his private dacha. Meanwhile, Georgy pushed for a formal medical commission. When it finally took place, the results were surprising: he was not only declared fit for service but his category was upgraded from “partially fit” to “fit with minor restrictions”.

In May, he was told to report for questioning regarding a criminal case. Georgy fled again. On the way to the commander’s dacha, he got a taxi and flew to St Petersburg. His wife met him there to hand over his passport. From there he flew to Belarus, then Uzbekistan, Georgia and finally Montenegro, where he was taken in by a Swedish artist for whom he helped build a swimming pool.

Oksana remained in Lyubertsy with the children. Weeks after her husband left, an investigator began calling her. Georgy was placed on a federal wanted list.

In September 2024, security forces raided the family home. They confiscated phones from Oksana and the children, returning them only two weeks later. The stress caused Oksana to suffer a nervous breakdown, leading to a month-long stay in a psychiatric clinic. The visits from military police continued; the last raid occurred on January 7, 2025. After that, Oksana finally agreed to leave Russia.

Georgy has spoken openly to the press about his escape. In Montenegro, he was interviewed by Current Time TV. The family crossed the German border accompanied by a journalist from Die Welt, which later published a detailed account. A report for the Franco-German channel Arte was also filmed by Russian journalist in exile Masha Borzunova.

The first six months in Germany were particularly precarious. Under EU law, the migration service could have deported the family back to Croatia, their first point of entry. To prevent this, Georgy sought help from the church.

The tradition of Kirchenasyl, or church asylum, began in 1983 after Cemal Kemal Altun, a 23-year-old Turkish activist, took his own life in a West Berlin court while facing extradition. His death moved church communities to unite to protect refugees from deportation. Every year, hundreds of people receive a reprieve through this practice. The Avalianis were among them.

“It is a semi-legal, more like a cultural phenomenon that works differently in different states,” explains Alshansky. “The church gives the applicant a document stating they are under their care, and the authorities leave them alone.”

Thanks to this intervention, BAMF could not reject the family simply because they entered via Croatia. They were forced to consider the case on its merits. They rejected it anyway.

BAMF’s motivation

During his personal hearing, Georgy Avaliani detailed his service and desertion. When asked what he feared if returned to Russia, he replied: “I fear for my life. Legally, I could be imprisoned for up to 20 years. But more likely, I will be killed before trial or in prison… I know for certain that if they find me, a subhuman death awaits me.”

His wife, Oksana, tried to explain the psychological toll the military police raids had taken on her and the children. The family provided lots of evidence: the mobilisation order, the wanted notice from the interior ministry’s website, a letter from a German humanitarian organisation, medical records and Georgy’s military ID.

In its rejection, the agency claimed the Avalianis were “apolitical people”, making it unclear why they believed the Russian state would view them as opponents. BAMF argued that if they were truly targeted, Georgy would never have been able to leave Russia so easily.

Having erroneously stated that Avaliani faced only an administrative fine, the official added that it was “not evident that in the applicants’ case, due to specific circumstances, a different [punishment] should apply”.

The document also asserted that officials found no evidence that mobilisation continued after Putin’s verbal announcement. Even if it were to resume, BAMF argued, it was not certain Avaliani would be called up again, given Russia’s 25 million reservists.

“Even taking into account that the applicant evaded mobilisation, it is not to be expected that… he would be subjected to the inhuman or degrading treatment required to grant asylum,” the decision stated.

The agency concluded the family could lead a dignified life in Russia. Despite the economic crisis, the official noted that people in Russia are still provided with food, social benefits and pensions. “It is not seen that… they would find themselves in a completely hopeless situation,” the ruling said. Their physical and mental health was also deemed insufficient to require treatment specifically in Germany.

A template for rejection

Alshansky attributes the BAMF decision to the wave of draft evaders who fled to Europe after 2022.

“A crowd of people rushed to claim asylum over mobilisation, some without even a summons,” he says. “I think they have exhausted the Germans to the point where, as soon as they see a Russian applicant and the word ‘mobilisation’, they just churn out this rejection.” Artyom Klyga, from the rights organisation Connection E. V., confirms that around 1,000 Russians have requested asylum in Germany due to mobilisation.

Alshansky points out that the rejection text clearly treats Avaliani as a mere draft dodger rather than a man who fled the front and is now a fugitive. He believes BAMF compiled the document from fragments of other cases without truly studying Georgy’s story. “I have compared this rejection with others. It is a template; paragraph after paragraph is identical. They just changed the personal details in a Word file,” Klyga agrees.

Mediazona compared several BAMF decisions regarding Russians who fled mobilisation. The similarities are striking. In the case of a young man who left after an attempt to serve him a summons, the agency also cited Putin’s words on the end of mobilisation. The description of the economic situation in Russia—including the detail that 15% of Russians live below the poverty line—is identical in both his and Avaliani’s files.

In another case involving a reservist who left on a tourist visa, the agency used the same argument: that mobilisation is about military strength, not political vengeance. That document also cited the same €302 fine.

The same arguments were used against Anton Sh., a deserter from Ufa whose story was covered by Sever.Realii. He had been tortured in the same Zaitsevo cellar, where guards pulled out almost all of his teeth. Despite his ordeal and the fact he is wanted in Russia, BAMF ruled he faced no danger because he had been able to leave the country freely.

Georgy Avaliani is now consulting with lawyers to appeal. “From my interview, it is perfectly clear that my situation is different [from other cases BAMF cited in the rejection]. This rejection shows that these people either cannot read or didn’t bother to try,” he said.

Even if his appeal fails, Georgy has no intention of returning. “I didn’t come here for tastier sausage, but to avoid dying in prison,” he says. “I had a good job in Russia. I will never reach that standard of living here; I’m not 20 or even 30 years old anymore. I didn’t travel far for a better life. I left solely because of persecution. Pity they don’t understand that.”

“Goodbye to Arms” estimates there are currently about 100 Russian deserters in Germany. For others planning to follow Avaliani’s route through Croatia, Alshansky recommends heading to other countries, such as Spain, where he says the bureaucratic logic remains more straightforward than in Germany.

Source: “Rubber‑stamping rejections. Germany turns away Russian army deserters who refused to fight in Ukraine, claiming they face only a fine back home,” Mediazona, 5 February 2026. Thanks to News from Ukraine Bulletin for the heads-up. The emphasis, above, is mine. \\\\\TRR

Irina and Anna’s Big Adventure

Pensioners Irina Nippolainen and Anna Trusova, friends and residents of the small Karelian town of Segezha, fled Russia in the spring of 2023 after the FSB came to search their homes. Anna and Irina were forced to make a long trek to Azerbaijan via Belarus before making their way to Germany, where they now have residence permits and social housing, and where they hope to find work. Meanwhile, back in their home country their relatives have been summoned for questioning in the criminal investigation against them. Journalists at the website Okno tell the story of the two women, who chose forced emigration over unfreedom.

ESCAPE

On 20 March 2023, 60-year-old Irina and 58-year-old Anna said goodbye after taken a stroll and went home. A few minutes later, Irina called Anna and told her that the FSB had come to see her. Anna rushed to her house after Irina’s call.

“As soon as I rang Irina’s doorbell, I immediately turned on the video on my phone to put the squeeze on them: Who the hell are you guys? The FSB guys saw that I was filming on my phone and immediately called someone, saying, ‘She’s here, come over.’ Anyway, it transpired that they had come for both of us.”

During the search, the FSB officers confiscated their phones and computers from the two pensioners. The search warrant stated that the searches were part of a criminal investigation into “public calls to engage in activity threatening state security.” Anna and Irina guessed that the case had been triggered by a denunciation. They both had written many posts on their VKontakte pages about their opposition to war, and in response had received a “barrage of hatred” from those who had read the posts.

“It was stressful. I lost eight kilograms during that time: I was so worried, I didn’t eat, and I didn’t know what would happen. I knew that people in Russia are sent to pretrial detention centers at any age even for sneezing at the authorities, and I did not know what exactly the law enforcers would find in the devices they confiscated and how they would interpret what they found. As soon as we were searched, my children immediately got involved in the problem, checking out everything they could: internet sites, their acquaintances, and then their acquaintances who had left the country. They decided how we should proceed—where and how to get asylum or other options. After analyzing everything, they decided that a humanitarian visa was the best option. We had to decide where to go, where to stay, and what to take with us,” says Irina.

They considered fleeing to two countries—Finland and Germany—but decided on the latter because it was easier to get a visa there.

But first Irina and Anna went to St. Petersburg, because they had to get papers for Anna’s dog Ramona. They stayed with an acquaintance of Anna’s, but the woman was very afraid that she would be “prosecuted for her connection” with the fugitive opposition activists, so they had to move out.

“Our children, who were assisting us, gave us the contact information for a man who did not know us at all but who wrote, ‘Come and stay as long as you want’. He helped us out and fed us, and we spent all that time while we were taking care of business at his house,” they explain.

Anna and Irina stayed in St. Petersburg for a week before departing for Azerbaijan.

They did not travel to Baku directly. For security reasons, they got themselves new cell phones, discussed the route, decided not to buy plane tickets in Russia, but to do it in Belarus, and went to Belarus by cab, paying 20,000 rubles [approx. 200 euros] for the fare.

“We took everything into account because we didn’t know how quickly they would come for us. In fact, we were very surprised that they didn’t nab us right away. We also chose Belarus because the dog was with us, and we felt bad about putting her in the luggage hold. Belavia is one of the few airlines that allow passengers to transport small animals in a carrier on a seat in the passenger cabin,” says Irina.

Irina and Anna flying from Minsk to Baku

After taking a cab to Minsk, they immediately went to the airport, bought tickets, and flew to Azerbaijan at night. In Baku, Irina and Anna initially settled in a small hotel.

“I was in such a state that my hair stood on end. For Anna, it was like an adventure, but for me it was like a misfortune, because I had left my home, my husband, and my pets. I didn’t want to leave my home or my country. That’s why I was very anxious. I even reached out to a psychologist from an aid organization, but she didn’t help me much,” Irina says.

Anna’s mood was a little different.

“I’m generally a traveler, but I hadn’t been able to travel lately. First there was the pandemic, then this whole thing happened. Not that I was freaking out about it, of course; I was freaking out for other reasons. But when it happened, I put three bathing suits in my suitcase—Ira makes fun of me—and went to the airport. I assumed I might have difficulties in Russia due to my intemperate tongue: I supposed that I would have to leave. I have a daughter in the Czech Republic, but the Czech Republic has a very bad attitude towards Russians, and they wouldn’t give me a visa. I thought that I would go to India, it’s quiet and peaceful there. My suitcase was initially packed with summer clothes. Of course, I was a bit nervous about the dangers. But basically, I always try to stay positive and hope for the best,” says Anna.

Anna, Ramona and Irina on the beach in Baku

Irina and Anna ultimately stayed in Baku for four months. They submitted the paperwork for humanitarian visas to Germany quite quickly, and had been approved by early June. But due to the local and the German bureaucracies they had to wait a long time for their papers. During this time, the pensioners already had their own circle of contacts—their landlady, their neighbors, and other refugees from Russia.

“And while there was uncertainty as to whether we would be granted a visa or not, we were already considering Azerbaijan as a place to live, because we could have lived there on our pensions. We had already found some channels for cashing money there, because our bank cards didn’t work there anyway. But still, we didn’t consider ourselves safe there,” Irina explains.

“GOD, HOW DID YOU BEAR IT ALL?”

In July, all their papers were in hand, so Irina and Anna began packing for Germany. They decided to make their way to Georgia first, since it was cheaper to fly to Germany from Tbilisi than from Baku. They went to Georgio by bus, stayed in Tbilisi for a couple of days before flying to Germany.

“When we arrived in Germany, I was already on VKontakte recounting all our adventures. And people wrote, “God, how did you bear it all?” Because there were a lot of hard moments. Personally, I was constantly stressed out, but it had become a way of life, you know. Anya is fine, she’s easygoing, but I can’t improvise when it comes to serious matters, I have to prepare and think things over. If I hadn’t followed all those rules, maybe we could have flown to Germany more easily, who knows. I’m a thorough person, I don’t want to lose money and end up stranded at the airport not knowing what to do. That is, I was preparing, I was checking out all the chat rooms and websites, seeing what papers we needed to get and where to go. There was a lot of preparation just for the dog. Without the dog, we would have done it all ten times easier, if not more. Because in different countries there are particular papers and certain vaccinations you have to have, and the airlines have certain requirements for the carrier. Ramona is a basically a ‘homeowner’—she had three portable houses,” Irina says.

“For the first time in her life, probably, when leaving Baku, Irina took sedatives because the dog in its carrier had to be placed in the trunk of the bus. And I was so worked up that even I took them too,” Anna remarks.

Anna and Irina flew to Frankfurt, where they were met by a friend of Irina’s who had lived in Germany for a long time. They had to get to their initial placement site, the town of Suhl in Thuringia, which is a three-hour drive from Frankfurt.

“But when we arrived there, we were told that pets were not permitted. Ukrainians used to bring pets there with them, but since now there are few Ukrainians in this camp and mostly Muslims, who have a bad attitude to dogs and are afraid of them, it is prohibited. So we urgently began looking for help on the chat rooms. A Ukrainian family agreed to take Ramona in for a while. They lived right next to the camp, and so we would go to their house to walk the dog. But then this young woman found out she had allergies, so Ana’s daughter quickly came from the Czech Republic and took Ramona away,” Irina explains.

A room in a German dormitory for refugees

The refugee camp where the pensioners were initially placed was a complex of five buildings, mostly inhabited by people from Arab countries.

“It was a bit scary to live in such an unfamiliar environment, given that the doors to the room in which we were put were unlocked. The police even came once because of a conflict in the building. We also had our passports taken from us and there was a risk that we would be processed in a different status—as refugees, even though we had ‘humanitarian visa’ stamped on our papers. We wrote everywhere, because they said that if we were registered as refugees, we could change this status only through the courts, and the courts could take years. That was scary. I said that we could not even return to Russia without a passport. Basically, it was a massive problem. I’d only recently been released, and I had put on two or three kilograms, because one thing or another was causing stress, but there was no getting around it,” Irina recounts.

Everything worked out well, ultimately. After a week, they were moved to the town of Greiz, a two-hour drive from Suhl. There they were allocated a social apartment, started to receive an allowance, were insured, and were issued social security numbers. By October, Anna and Irina had received residence permits for three years. During all this time, however, the pensioners had to confront the famous German bureaucracy more than once.

“They have an algorithm, as it were. But the human factor often gets in the way. People who work in this system, they do not know all the laws, or often they do things just to check off the boxes. But our case was quite peculiar for them: we are Russian pensioners, we have humanitarian visas, and they probably have a million other refugees here. Things were difficult, but when you look back, you think, What was there to worry about?” said Anna and Irina.

After the paperwork was completed, the friends moved again, but not far—to the city of Gera, thirty kilometers from Greiz. Each of them found rented accommodation there, which is paid for by the municipality. The apartments there are rented empty, with no furniture or appliances.

“When we moved from one place to another, they stopped paying us in the old place, but here they hadn’t started paying us yet, and it took two months to process the registration. So for two months we were without money or furniture,” Irina explains.

Since she had not yet been discharged from social housing, they could still live there together legally for some time and work on furnishing their new homes.

“The Ukrainians who live here have set up a help chat room and chat rooms for selling different things. I bought a bed and a chest of drawers from Ukrainians. I got some things for free. Germans often sell things they don’t need for very cheap. For example, I bought a complete kitchen set for only 100 euros, which is practically nothing. Now I’m looking for a bigger refrigerator,” Irina says.

Irina’s apartment after she furnished it

Anna, on the other hand, found an app similar to the Russian website Avito, where used furniture was sold, and bought almost everything she needed at wholesale prices.

“The only thing I was left without was a kitchen. I didn’t have a stove, but I got a microwave, and I could survive with a microwave. I bought a kettle. And that’s how I lived for the first few months,” she said.

The pensioners were at pains to point out that no one refused to help them. People who had also immigrated to Germany, some twenty years earlier and others two years earlier, offered them bedding, dishes, and household supplies. When Irina and Anna had settled in, they passed some of these things on to a family from Ukraine.

Expiring products are given to immigrants for next to nothing

People who have been granted humanitarian visas in Germany can choose not to work and live on benefits. But they can try to find a job if they want. Before they retired, Anna was involved in marketing cosmetics, while Irina helped animals. After ten years at the official municipal animal shelter, she ran a mini-shelter for five dogs, one of which she ultimately adopted. Finding a job in Germany is still difficult for them.

“We don’t speak German, so the opportunities to find work are few and far between for the time being. I am registered at the job center, while Irina is now registered with the Sozialamt, and she can live on her pension in peace, but I will only go on 31 July to test the level of my German. God willing, I will test out at A1, since I almost got A’s in German back in school. After taking this test, I do not know when I will be able to take German-language classes. Many emigrants take these courses two or three times. Then again, I’m old, so things don’t stick in my head nowadays. Of course, I would like somehow to learn the language faster and integrate faster,” Anna says, laughing.

Irina says that she has not been assigned to an integration course, so for the time being she is also living without knowledge of the German language and therefore jobless. While she was still living in Greiz, she worked a two-hour trial day as a seamstress in a local factory . Irina liked it very much. When she moved to Gera, she also wrote to one of the factories there, but was told that German was required. Getting a job is likewise important to Irina because she wants to invite her husband, who stayed behind Russia, to join her in Germany, which is impossible to do if she is unemployed. Irina’s husband would also need to know German, but how and where he can learn it and pass the test for the simplest level is still unclear. Irina herself attends German language courses, but they are run by volunteers and thus unofficial.

Anna and Irina say that even without jobs they have enough to do—they have traveled all over the area.

“We have been traveling a lot since day one. While we didn’t have papers, we used to walk, and then we got the chance to buy transit passes that enable us to travel by rail, buses, trams, and subways,” says Irina, who has also been to travel to Finland to visit her children, and to Stockholm and Copenhagen to meet friends.

Anna has bought a sewing machine and begun sewing.

“I used to do needlework, but in recent years things had not been coming together. Now I have started knitting curtains, and I will start weaving; I want to do a lot of things. I knitted myself a sweater. I bought brushes and paints and started drawing a bit, but have given it up for the time being. Mostly, I want to walk more. We are from Karelia and have a tradition of walking as the first thing one needs to do. And I had a dog then. Here I bought a bicycle as soon as I got the furniture: I jumped on the bike and went riding. You have to see everything around you. It takes a lot of time to see everything, to photograph it, to edit it, to upload it to the internet. So there is not enough time,” she explains.

By the way, both pensioners are each on their third VKontakte page: their previous pages had been blocked by the Russian authorities.

“DID THEY WRITE ABOUT BUCHA?”

Karelian law enforcement never forgot Irina and Anna.

In April 2024, it transpired that a criminal case had been opened against the two émigrés on charges of disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army. They found out about it because Irina’s husband was summoned to testify, for some reason, in the criminal investigation against Anna. Only when he met with the investigator, it transpired that Irina was also being prosecuted on the same charge. The husband refused to answer the investigator’s questions, invoking Article 51 of the Constitution (which permits an individual not to testify against themself or their spouse). Anna’s sister was then summoned for questioning in the same investigation. A little later, it transpired that both Anna and Irina had been put on the federal wanted list. And shortly before this interview, a person unknoiwn, who introduced himself as a policeman, wrote to Anna via WhatsApp and asked her where she was.

How many criminal “fake news” cases have been launched in Russia

In March 2022, after invading Ukraine, Russia adopted laws that criminalized disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army and “discrediting:” its actions. As of February 2024, 402 such cases had been brought. Dozens of Russians have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms for allegedly violating the law. According to human rights activists, this is tantamount to military censorship.

It is still unknown why the criminal case was launched. The relatives were asked during questioning what Irina and Anna had written on their first VKontakte pages. They made a special point of asking, “Did they write about Bucha?”

“It’s no fun feeling like a criminal. Although we all know what it means now in this [sic] country. In short, the crackdown continues: you are on the right side, and they are on the wrong side. They have to do something: there’s probably no one left in Karelia to sink their claws into anymore, but they need fulfill quotas. It’s a crackdown for its own sake. I feared for my relatives, because way back in 1938 there were so-called enemies of the people, and children, wives, and husbands of enemies of the people. I’m afraid lest it come to this,” Irina says.

The human rights activists consulted by Anna and Irina have advised them not to return to Russia before the regime changes, otherwise they will be sentenced to hard time in prison.

“FOR THREE DAYS I BAWLED LIKE A BELUGA”

Both émigrés follow the news from Russia closely. They argue that the country is “hurtling into an abyss.”

“What is happening is simply absurd. It feels like the country exists in a kind of distorted reality in which good is evil, and black is white. They are engaged in such insanity, frankly, and you don’t understand how it is possible to support all of this. And then there are the people who have gone crazy on a nationwide scale and who think everything is fine there, that it’s the way it should be. I worked at a polling place for many years and I used to say all the time that when we socialize only with our own kind, we don’t see what the rest of the people are like, but I saw all kinds of people at the polling station. I know that might sound kind of arrogant, but I saw how massively ignorant people were. I’ve always been skeptical of the claim that the Soviet Union had the best education system. I don’t know how it was the best if it didn’t teach people to think, and if people blindly trust the authorities. The authorities are king and god to them, as this whole situation has shown. Basically, you get the feeling that all people have come down with insanity, and some are immune. The analogy with Hitler’s Germany immediately comes to mind, where the people were fooled in the same way, gulled by propaganda. Maybe there is still hope that if the regime changes and they tell folks on TV how it really was, then…. We are now like spectators looking at Russia from the outside, and it’s scary to watch what is happening there,” Irina says.

When asked how they reacted to the news of politician Alexei Navalny’s death, Anna is unable to reply. She immediately starts crying.

“That’s how we reacted,” Irina explains, crying too.

“It’s good that my daughter was here that day: we went to Munich with her. I spent the whole day with them. But in the evening they went to a concert, and I got on the Munich chat rooms and found out that there would be a rally on Freedom Square and went there,” says Anna.

Alexei Navalny’s Death

The news of Alexei Navalny’s death came on 16 February 2024. He had been serving a nineteen-year sentence for “extremism,” after being convicted on seven criminal charges, including “creating an extremist community.” During his imprisonment, he was sent to a punishment cell twenty-seven times, spending almost 300 days there. After the politician’s death, pickets to mourn his passing were held in Russian cities, and the picketers were detained by the police en masse. The authorities refused to hand over his body to his relatives for a long time, demanding that they bury him in secret. Navalny’s associates argue that he was murdered and blame President Vladimir Putin for his death.

“I bawled like a beluga for three days. I still can’t even look at the photos of him calmly,” Irina adds.

“In the past, Ira, you used to say, ‘Navalny will be released and I’ll go home,'” her friend remarks.

Irina doesn’t make any predictions now that she has emigrated.

“I don’t make any predictions and I don’t listen to them. My motto now is: do what must be done and what will be will be. And I would also add: do what you have to do and what you are able to do. What matters most is saving yourself and your loved ones. We don’t know how long this will last. Analyzing things even as they stand now, I can confidently say that nothing good is going to happen…. Well, how should I put it? Nothing good is going to happen quickly. But I’m not ruling out either possibility: that I’ll stay here, or that I’ll go back there. I’ll go home as soon as I can. If nothing changes there, I’ll stay here.”

Anna, however, says that she has almost no one left in Russia: her daughter emigrated to the Czech Republic back in 2016, and she hardly communicates with her relatives who stayed behind in Russia.

“I will be better off here anyway. As long as they don’t kick me out, I’ll stay here,” she adds.

The pensioners nevertheless try to keep involved in Russian politics. They traveled to Leipzig to sign a petition supporting Boris Nadezhdin’s presidential candidacy and then to Berlin to vote in the presidential election.

Irina signing a petition in support of Boris Nadezhdin’s presidential bid

“There was such a huge queue. Because we were afraid of missing the train, we cut the queue a bit. A lot of people could not vote because, I think, only two polling stations were open in Germany—in Berlin and in Bonn. There were a lot of people who wanted to vote. We stood in line there with Yulia Navalnaya. And I talked to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and we had our pictures taken with Ekaterina Schulmann. There were so many celebrities, and the queue itself was very cool. There were a lot of young people, all chanting “Russia without Putin.” But there were also a few pro-Putin people who have lived in Germany for twenty years and go vote for Putin, and we trolled them a little bit. But this is life, this is reality,” says Irina.

Irina Navalnaya, Kira Yarmysh, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky

What do Anna and Irina dream of?

“Grandchildren!” Anna answers immediately. “And first of all, of course, that the war end!”

“The first thing I wish for is that the war end. And the second is for me to go home,” says Irina.

Source: “‘It’s no fun feeling like a criminal’: female pensioners from Karelia emigrated to remain free,” Okno, 11 June 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade Koganzon for the heads-up.

Germany Going Down the Tubes, or, Lies Come in All Sizes

Greg Yudin
September 2, 2015
Facebook

Excellent, just excellent. I look and see that Ulyana Skoibeda has published a diary about how terrible life is in Germany [in the mass circulation newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda]. I think, what is this crap? What would Skoibeda know about Germany? I have a look: the entire structure of their propaganda and the stuff of which it is made are visible after three paragraphs.

b_2a67b16725839005f2a25b51ebfa9bb8 — **Ulyana Skoibeda (center) and friends**

The diary’s author is a certain Galina Ivanova, who moved to Germany but is now escaping it in horror at the influx of immigrants and the inaction of Germans. Since the text is executed in the “eyewitness” genre, it has immediately become wildly popular. To drive the point home, Skoibeda has supplied the diary entries with “links to major German media and speeches by officials.” She is thus hinting that every piece of evidence of Europe’s disintegration is backed up with a reference in perfect German. This is not the story of the three-year-old boy, allegedly crucified in Slovyansk by Ukrainian soldiers, but since proven a fake, she seems to say. You won’t nitpick this one to death.

What is great is that if you follow these links and start reading, you will find that almost all of them are total lies. And the lies come in all sizes. Some of the links lead to off-topic stuff like poverty statistics. Or, for example, the diary’s author angrily reports that Muslims have been abusing Germans to such an extent that “in many school cafeterias, pork sausages, salami, and pâté have been banned.” The link leads to a story about a crazy Egyptian family who asked a court to ban pork dishes. This happened in Vienna (which, for Skoibeda’s information, is in Austria) and was laughed off by the local legal community. But does it really take much to scare Russian readers?

Or, for example, there is a tear-jerking story about German pensioners having to dig in trash urns to collect empty bottles. The link is to an item in Die Republikaner in which there is not a single (!) mention of pensioners. The item itself is about how a society in which people are forced to collect bottles (by the way, have you never seen such a society outside of Germany?) should deal with this rather than facilitating the collection of bottles.

And then there is the top of this pop chart, which, of course, consists in the fact that the majority of the links in the text (including the links to newspapers, officials, and various sensational news items) in fact lead to one and the same site, Netzplanet, a collective right-wing blog that went online two years ago. The bloggers there complain about immigrants and scare each other over Islamization. Their Facebook page has already been blocked because its owners were not willing to provide the necessary information about themselves. The site itself is registered to a company in Panama. I won’t go on.

No “Galina Ivanova” really exists, of course. (In any case, it wasn’t she who wrote this text, unless Galina Ivanova is Skoibeda’s real name.) Because at any newspaper, even this one, there are fact checkers, and if Skoibeda really had been sent a “diary with links,” she would have found people with a knowledge of German and verified the information.

But the miserable PR people and degenerates from the security service who were given the task of collecting facts about problems with immigrants in Germany do exist. And they blew it. And now Skoibeda’s byline is attached to an article with a thousand proofs that she lies.

I always recommend the first thing university students do is learn foreign languages. Because you are surrounded by tons of people who intend to mess with your brains, and your own government is engaged in this above all. It is not the gullible who are most easily manipulated, but those who don’t know how to check things. Languages are the best chance of navigating the world on one’s own. It is impossible to know all languages, but if you know one foreign language, and your friend knows another one, the government will find it much harder to put one over on you. That is exactly why our MPs are so keen to ban the study of foreign languages in schools. Then Skoibeda will be able to tell readers that people with dogs’ heads inhabit Europe.

Greg Yudin is a research fellow and lecturer at The Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Photo courtesy of Trud.ru. Translated by The Russian Reader