‘They want to show no one can escape’: how the long arm of Russia is reaching out for Putin critics in exile

Lev Skoriakin, 23, fled Russia in January 2023 after he was accused of organising a protest outside the FSB security service’s headquarters in Moscow. As his passport was confiscated by the Russian authorities, he was left with a limited number of escape destinations.

“I could choose Armenia, Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan. I do not know why I chose Kyrgyzstan,” Skoriakin says. “At the time we [Russians who sought to leave the country] thought that if we do not stick our heads out, we will be safe. But we were wrong.”

Late in the evening on 16 October 2023, a group of men from the Kyrgyzstan security services knocked on his hostel door in the capital, Bishkek, and asked him to come with them. They drove him to the airport and handed him over to the Russian security service, who handcuffed and accompanied him on a passenger flight back to Moscow.

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of Russians fled the country in search of safety and to avoid mobilisation, many to central Asia. Many Russians do not have passports, and Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan can be entered with only a national ID.

But a growing number of Russians are finding that neighbouring countries in the region, in particular Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, are far from safe.

At least 14 Russian citizens were either detained or deported at Russia’s request from Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan in 2022 and 2023 alone, according to a Freedom House report on transnational repression .

Grady Vaughan, from Freedom House, says: “There are three main types of people Russia seeks to return. These are, obviously, former military officials and soldiers who were afraid of being called up to the war and deserted.

“Then there have also been independent activists, both anarchists and anti-war activists, who have also found themselves detained in relation to their activism and sometimes deported. The third group are journalists.”

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Central Asian countries, especially Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, have sought to remain neutral since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but cooperation between the local security services and their Russian counterparts has continued uninterrupted.

Vaughan says: “There is this history of coordination that has made it easier for Russia to rely on these countries’ security services to increase pressure or to intimidate Russian exiles.”

Alina Gorshenina, 29, an ethnic Russian born and raised in Kyrgyzstan, was travelling on an organised tour to Almaty, a city in Kazakhstan, with her mother and 10-year-old daughter to celebrate Children’s Day last June. As they tried to cross the border, she was arrested.

Unbeknown to Alina, Russian authorities had issued an international arrest warrant for her, accusing her of causing bodily harm to a judge in Russia. Thinking she would just be sent back to Kyrgyzstan, she told her mother and daughter to continue the trip without her.

She had only visited Russia twice in her life – the last time seven years ago – but had been a volunteer for Alexei Navalny’s team and a fervent anti-Putin activist, who often got involved in social media quarrels with pro-Putin public figures. “My posts must have offended someone high up,” she told the Guardian.

Alina ended up spending two months behind bars in Kazakhstan before she was freed and allowed to return home. She is now working with a Russian lawyer to fight the charges remotely.

Murat Adam, a Kazakh lawyer who has worked on several cases of people detained at Russia’s request, says: “I think that Russia is trying to intimidate people and to show that those activists who left can also be arrested. They want to scare people off.”

In some of these cases, Kazakhstan refused to deport people to Russia. But according to Adam, this was not because of Kazakhstan’s goodwill, but rather Russia’s failure to submit all the documents to facilitate deportation.

“Our prosecutor general’s office would agree to deport these individuals if Russia provided sufficient proof of their wrongdoing and its intention to prosecute them. But no one provides the information, and Kazakhstan cannot keep people in detention indefinitely,” says Adam.

After his extradition to Russia, Skoriakin expected a long sentence. But instead, after pleading guilty, he received a fine and was set free. He has now moved to Germany, which had granted him asylum before he left for Kyrgyzstan.

“I do not feel completely safe anywhere, but it is surely safer than Kyrgyzstan,” he says. “Russia’s goal is one: to show that no one can escape them.”