More than 400 Russians seek protection in Spain: "I do not want to be part of this crime against Ukraine"

Run away.

Run away and not participate in a crime.

This is the common sentiment that has prompted thousands of Russian citizens to leave their country and seek political asylum, especially after the brutal invasion of Ukraine launched by President Vladimir Putin on February 24.

According to the latest data from the Ministry of the Interior, 437 of them have landed in Spain.

Those of María, Dimitri, Vilen and Iván are four stories that reflect the claustrophobia, the fears and the pressure they felt in Russia and the different reasons that pushed them to leave their families, their homes and their jobs to start a new life in another place with more freedom.

Also away from the threats of imprisonment, homophobia and Putin's army.

Vilen has been "fighting against Russian politics and Putin's politics" since he was 19 years old, he recalled on Monday from a park in the north of Madrid where he arrived somewhat blushing.

Originally from Krasnodar, in southwestern Russia, this asylum seeker is 25 today. He landed in Spain with his boyfriend in June, fleeing the army, but also overcome by the homophobia he suffered in Russia.

“The day I left [June 12] was very sad.

I went to see my grandmother;

my mother would not let go of my hand.

She wondered why I had to go so far.

I also said goodbye to my brothers.

There were tears and lots of hugs,” recalls the young man with a nervous smile.

Although he understood Vilen's reasons for leaving Russia, his mother held him while she begged him to go to a slightly closer country, like Armenia or Georgia, but he didn't want to.

"There is a very strong homophobia there," he laments.

For this reason, with the financial help of the mother of her boyfriend, she chose to start a life in Madrid, a city that she arrived by plane through Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, and Warsaw.

“It was a very hard day.

I understood that from then on I would not know when I could see my family again, ”he recalls, resigned, but grateful for the support he found upon his arrival.

For example, by an activist who welcomed them into his home or by the Spanish Commission for Refugee Assistance (CEAR), which helps them, like other asylum seekers, with the bureaucracy to obtain international protection and has facilitated the preparation of this report.

city ​​to which he arrived by plane through Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, and Warsaw.

“It was a very hard day.

I understood that from then on I would not know when I could see my family again, ”he recalls, resigned, but grateful for the support he found upon his arrival.

For example, by an activist who welcomed them into his home or by the Spanish Commission for Refugee Assistance (CEAR), which helps them, like other asylum seekers, with the bureaucracy to obtain international protection and has facilitated the preparation of this report.

city ​​to which he arrived by plane through Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, and Warsaw.

“It was a very hard day.

I understood that from then on I would not know when I could see my family again, ”he recalls, resigned, but grateful for the support he found upon his arrival.

For example, by an activist who welcomed them into his home or by the Spanish Commission for Refugee Assistance (CEAR), which helps them, like other asylum seekers, with the bureaucracy to obtain international protection and has facilitated the preparation of this report.

Vilin, a Russian exile, withdrawn in a park in Madrid.

alvaro garcia

Despite the fact that Vilen – dark haired, with a beard three or four days old and innocent honey-colored eyes – left his country before the general mobilization of reservists decreed by Putin on September 21, the young man already smelled what was to come.

He has run away from compulsory military service since he is of legal age.

He managed to be granted alternative civil service (services in public entities such as hospitals or residences), but it was never put into practice, so Defense officials continue to search for him.

“I am a pacifist,” he says, “and any comment or protest against the official narrative can carry penalties of up to 15 years in prison.”

So Vilen, coordinator of a conscientious objector movement, began to fear for his future because of his organization's stance against the war in Ukraine.

“I renounce belonging to the Russian army.

I don't want to join the ranks, ”he sentences.

To her compatriot María de ella, a 35-year-old lesbian exiled in Barcelona, ​​this law, however, did not intimidate her and she has been publishing her criticisms against the war on her social networks.

"I think that is also activism," María illustrated on Friday from a cafeteria in Barcelona, ​​where she has lived since July.

Something similar happens to Dimitri (false name to preserve his privacy), 29 years old.

He was able to do the alternative civil service, as he accredits during the interview, on Monday in the center of Madrid, where he arrived on November 18.

He was able to leave Russia just a week after the draft for men of fighting age to go to the Ukrainian front.

On October 20, a month later, Dimitri's grandfather received the notice for his granddaughter to report to the recruiting office.

Luckily, the young man was already out of the country, an escape that he had been chewing since April.

“After the start of the war [in February], the situation in Russia was going to get complicated and I decided that I did not want to be part of this crime against Ukraine.

We were already participating through taxes,

but I didn't want this to happen in a more direct way.

That was my biggest fear”, says this very thin, tall fashion designer, who also belongs to the LGTBI collective.

A Russia in decline

Dimitri, who has not yet officially applied for asylum in Spain, not only believes that the war is a crime by the Russian government against Ukraine, but also against his own nation.

“Everything that has been built [in Russia] in the last 30 years, like businesses, etc., is now in decline,” he says.

María, a feminist activist —and much more combative—, fully agrees: "Russia is becoming a medieval country," she joked on Friday in Barcelona.

“Now she is in the throes of a tremendous crisis.

You have to pay a lot of money for food, which is of a shitty quality.

And public transport costs a little more every year, ”she lamented.

The designer, like all those interviewed for this report, remembers every detail of the day he made the decision to flee Putin's Russia, Russia at war, homophobic Russia and receding.

“It was the afternoon of September 28, I was in the office and I went to talk to my manager.

I told her that she was leaving me, that she was taking vacations ahead of schedule.

My companions understood it and with tears in their eyes they said goodbye.

I went home and collected my things.

The next day, he left his Moscow apartment—which he still pays for to this day—and caught a plane to St. Petersburg, from where he boarded a bus that took him to Helsinki in seven hours.

“The army already understood that many of us were fleeing [from the mobilization to the ranks] and installed border controls [to intercept men of age to go to the front],

but the bus driver took alternative roads to avoid them”, he says.

"We were trying to get ahead of the government," she boasts.

In Helsinki he spent a few days in a hostel "overcrowded with Russians", she illustrates with a certain humor.

From there they teleworked while the news of the war was reported in the press.

Dimitri, who comes to the interview in Madrid looking very well cared for (immaculate black patent leather shoes and perfectly ironed beige pants), recounts his journey: from Helsinki to Tampere, also in Finland;

from there to Amsterdam, where he met up with some friends.

The next stage was the Portuguese island of Madeira, where he had already been — "The ocean will help me lower all this tension," he thought —, to later spend a few days in the Azores.

From there, he wanted to visit some friends in Georgia, but things got complicated.

As he was heading to Tbilisi via Bucharest and Tel Aviv, the Israelis stopped him and sent him back to Romania.

“Do you know how many Russians who enter as tourists leave Israel later?

Zero”, he assures that an official at the Tel Aviv airport rebuked him.

So Dimitri was deported to Bucharest, from where he boarded another flight to Madrid.

“Paradoxically, they sat me next to a Ukrainian lady with whom I got along very well.

She ended up giving me her food because she told me that I was going to need it more,” she recalls.

Despite everything, he does not lose hope of returning to his country.

He assures that this is a calmer period, before the Government mobilizes the ranks again after the Christmas holidays, at the beginning of 2023. “I am afraid to return because it may be that later they will not let me leave or that they will call the police and take me to a recruiting center.

Those risks exist,” she assures.

Persecution

That feeling of persecution has also accompanied Iván (false name to protect his identity) for years, a 22-year-old from Saint Petersburg who is studying Archeology at the University of Seville.

“I know they are looking for me because they have my mother's contact and they send her an SMS asking me to update my information.

But it's a trap.

They are looking for all of us!” he exclaims.

He left Russia last year, before the war, for being a pacifist and wanting to escape conscription campaigns for compulsory military service.

He also denies the civil alternative (which Dimitri did) because he believes that it is a kind of "legalized slavery" in which people work for less than the minimum wage.

Iván, a 22-year-old Russian youth, posed in Seville.PACO PUENTES

Ivan remembers that when he left Russia, on the night of September 18-19, 2021, it was very cloudy.

He took a flight from Saint Petersburg to Moscow, from there another to Madrid and then to Seville.

“I was very happy, I couldn't believe it”, he exclaimed from one of the most emblematic parks in the Andalusian capital.

“It was hard leaving my mother and sister, even though they both understood my situation,” he says.

After a long silence, he emotionally settles: "It was an election without an election."

In his blue gaze you can see the resignation of someone who knows that he will never recover everything he left behind.

The young student – ​​long, curly hair, hands in his pockets and an infectious smile – says that the situation in Russia had been “too tense” since 2014, when Putin illegally annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea.

“It was better to live in silence”, he recounts, referring to any hint of a response against the Government.

Iván is also an outspoken pacifist and grew up, he says, with an open mind.

"I did not fit in Russia, in Russian society."

He would like to go back and see his mother and his sister—he doesn't talk to his father because he supports the war in Ukraine—but he doesn't think he can live in the current society of the Eurasian country.

“It is quite toxic.

There is homophobia, militarism, fascism, sexism.

I don't fit in that society."

Iván anticipates that he will not be able to return to his country "at least in the next five or six years."

Maria is more pessimistic and is sure that she will never return to St. Petersburg, her hometown.

Or "at least in a decade" because "before there will be no changes."

This professional musician —she plays the drums, an instrument that she has tattooed on her left forearm next to the N, the initial of an old girlfriend who is now pro-Putin— arrived in Barcelona in July, where the NGO Accem helps her with the related paperwork. with the asylum.

"Starting a whole life from the bottom, almost from scratch, is very crazy for me," she says with a big smile.

María remembers two moments that marked her life forever and that made her realize the radical change she was about to undertake.

The first was on February 27.

She was peacefully demonstrating in Saint Petersburg against the war in Ukraine and was detained for several hours.

“While she protested making a human chain I said to myself: 'Fuck her!

I stay here until the

come [reference to the Russian police, because of the impressive riot gear they usually wear]”.

Finally, the police broke the human chain and Maria was violently detained.

Maria Konosova, pictured in Barcelona.

MASSIMILIANO MINOCRI

The second milestone, which really “was the straw that broke the camel's back”, occurred when the mass media reported on the Bucha massacre at the end of March.

“I remember that morning waking up in my room, at my house in Russia, I read it and I started crying.

Meanwhile, my mother and grandmother were in the kitchen laughing, as if nothing had happened.

I remember my feeling of wanting to run, of wanting to run away at that moment.

I didn't leave my room all day, I couldn't.

I could not bear this hypocrisy: that they were laughing while a genocide was taking place in Bucha”, he recounts.

María confesses that before the Bucha massacre —in which some 350 corpses were found in mass graves— she fantasized about leaving Russia, but that day she collided with reality.

“I just wanted to get my things and get out.

I couldn't bear what I was living and feeling.

It was very hard".

Despite the pain of leaving home, family, friends, jobs, these asylum seekers feel a deep relief to have left Russia.

Vilen and Maria no longer feel like worse people (in the words of the activist) for being homosexual or for shouting against the war in Ukraine.

Dimitri and Iván, for the moment, have stopped feeling the breath on the back of the neck of the employees of the military recruitment offices.

Now the four of them, like so many other Russians fleeing the Putin regime every day, are trying to start over somewhere that offers them a future.

"History has not taught anything," sums up Iván.

Follow all the international information on

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber