“We have a saying about the police in Russia: If someone reports a threat, they tell you: ‘Come back when you’ve been murdered’ – and, sometimes, it feels like the bureaucrats making asylum decisions [in the EU] work on the same principle,” said Oleg Ponomarev, a Russian dissident whose asylum request was rejected by Germany and who now risks jail or conscription if he is forcibly deported.

Russian refugee Nikita Belov, who faces deportation by Finland, also said he would be “arrested immediately on charges of high treason” if sent back.

And Artem Vovchenko, who went AWOL from the Russian army, was already jailed when the US deported him to Russia, despite his medical problems, but later escaped again.

“After a few months in pretrial detention [in Russia], I couldn’t walk, sit, or stand [due to pain]. My left leg was paralysed, as my herniated disc was compressing a nerve, and I had gastric problems due to the cramped conditions and bad food … I fell into depression and waited for something, I didn’t know what,” he told EUobserver.

“I’m trying to get back on my feet now and I just need a little support from people who still believe in goodness and love”, Vovchenko said, speaking from hiding in a secret location outside Russia.

But EU asylum rejection rates show there is little love for Russians fleeing president Vladimir Putin’s regime.

One reason is ignorance of Russia among EU immigration authorities, as Ponomarev and Belov’s stories shows.

Other motives were security fears, especially over ex-Russian soldiers, such as Vovchenko.

But the main reason is Europe’s lurch toward far-right politics on immigration in general – and Vovchenko’s story shows what the EU might become if it stays on the path towards US-type brutality against people in need.

“I was sent back slave-style, chained like a slave, stuffed onto a plane, and handed over directly to Russian border guards with no chance of escape,” Vovchenko told EUobserver of his deportation to Russia in September last year.

Little EU love

Some 50,625 Russians have applied for EU protection in the three years since Putin fully invaded Ukraine in 2022, according to the European Commission, as part of a much larger Russian exodus.

They did it either because they opposed the war and feared Putin’s crackdown on dissent or because they risked conscription — which meant either death on the front line or being ordered to commit war crimes.

“Russians don’t apply for asylum because of benefits or social aid,” said Anastasia Burakova, the founder of Ark, an international group which helps Russian asylum seekers.

“If they had stayed quiet, hadn’t spoken out against the war, hadn’t supported Ukraine, and stayed in Russia, they would have had a higher standard of living. Russians apply for asylum because they need legal protection and safe status, when the state is going after them for their views,” she said.

But despite this, Russians faced EU-average rejection rates of 67.6 percent for first-instance applications in 2022, which has since risen year-by-year to 80.2 percent in 2025.

Denmark (100% in 2025), Germany (93.8%), Greece (91.3%), Sweden (88.9%), Bulgaria (88.9%), and Poland (81.2%) were among the toughest EU countries.

Italy bucked the trend, where rejection rates fell from 39.3 percent in 2022 to 19.1 percent in 2025, despite the right-wing government of Giorgia Meloni’s storied hostility toward Arab and black immigrants.

And the net result is that 12,150 Russians have already “returned following an order to leave” over the past three years, the EU Commission said.

Some 10,440 more were also “ordered to leave” in 2025, while 9,955 were found to be “illegally present” in the EU last year, having ignored previous expulsion orders.

Ark’s Burakova explained how the EU system worked in practice.

“An order to leave is not the same as imminent deportation,” she said.

“In the great majority of cases, EU countries give people time to leave on their own [30 days] after a final negative asylum decision, so a person isn’t pushed onto a plane and sent straight to a Russian prison,” she said.

“Many of these orders are appealed [e.g. on medical grounds], delayed, or simply remain unenforced for years,” said Burakova.

Those who left voluntarily often went to the Western Balkans or the South Caucasus if they felt too unsafe to return to Russia.

But a minority had been subjected to “forced removal under guard” to Russia, said Burakova.

In one example, Pavel Kuzmichev, who fled Russia by boat to Finland in 2023, was denied asylum, put on a ferry to Estonia in 2025, accompanied by Finnish police officers, driven to the Russian border and handed over to Russian border guards.

Kuzmichev was immediately detained, sent to Vyborg Prison, near St Petersburg, and no one has heard of him since.

Andrey Pivivarov from The Anti-War Committee, an international group which also helps Russian asylum seekers, said: “We have no exact numbers of Russians in the EU who are now awaiting forced deportation after being denied asylum, but we currently have several dozen cases in progress”.

“If they don’t leave voluntarily, the police may detain them, take them to an immigration detention facility, and deport them [to Russia] via a third country,” he said.

“There are no direct flights from the EU to Russia [due to EU aviation sanctions], but since this year, a practice has emerged in Germany whereby people are deported to Russia via third countries, such as Serbia or Armenia,” Pivivarov added.

And at the same time, a proposed EU crackdown on Russian tourist visas risks closing one of the few avenues that conscientious objectors to Putin’s war had to get out.

People can only apply for asylum once on EU territory, but with Finland, the Baltic states, and Poland having de facto closed their Russian borders, “the tourist visa remains one of the few realistic entry channels for reaching Europe,” said M. A., an Armenian-origin postgraduate student at the Freie Universität Berlin, who wrote a research paper on Russian émigrés, and who was born in Russia, but asked not to be fully named due to his ongoing ties there.

“I don’t want my surname to come up in a Google search by the FSB [Russia’s main intelligence service],” he said.

Pain of EU limbo

Deportation aside, those living in limbo after the EU rejected their asylum claims also suffered.

“The threat of deportation is, in itself, a form of psychological torture,” Belov, a 25-year-old engineer, told EUobserver.

“We [he and his mum, Olga, who also applied for shelter in Finland] live inside an information bubble where people constantly discuss what has happened to those who were already sent back … So, when we were put in immigration detention [about to be deported], we were terrified,” he said.

The Belovs won a temporary reprieve from the Finnish Immigration Service (Migri), but still suffered “panic attacks and severe anxiety, and the thought that this could happen again … We are both on antidepressants prescribed by a psychiatrist,” Belov said.

And his anxiety was compounded by a sense of injustice, given that the pre-war Russian diaspora in Finland, which broadly supported Putin, faced no consequences for their pro-war views.

“We personally know Russians who have lived in Finland for many years and hold such opinions … many pro-Putin Russians [in Finland] backed the decision to deport us,” he said.

“We don’t understand why Finland is so lenient toward them, while anti-war activists and opposition supporters are treated so harshly,” Belov said.

Ponomarev, a 31-year-old IT specialist, said: “I am scared of prison [if deported] and I’m scared of being drafted into the army as a mechanism of political repression”.

“I’ve experienced weight fluctuations and I live with constant anxiety. The biggest issue is finding psychological help: To see a therapist through the standard system here, you need almost native-level German, while finding a Russian-speaking professional is incredibly difficult”, he said.

Meanwhile, the Belovs risked deportation despite having a compelling case for asylum.

He and his mum had spoken out against the Ukraine war while in Russia, before he was sacked from his job and began receiving death threats on social media, prompting them to flee to Finland in August 2022.

They attended pro-Ukrainian protests in their home town of Uusikaupunki and sent aid, such as 3D-printers (used to make drone components) and medical kits, to the Ukrainian military.

This made them liable to prosecution for “state treason” and “terrorism”, which carry penalties of up to life in prison, said their lawyer, Eduard Khairetdinov, in an affidavit seen by EUobserver.

And Russian authorities clearly had them on their radar – they have sent military summons papers to Belov’s old Russian address and tried to find out where he now was using his ‘Gosuslugi’ account (a Russian state-services portal).

Russian police also raided his grandmother’s apartment in October 2022 and pressured her to persuade him to return.

When EUobserver asked Migir why Belov was rejected, it declined to discuss details, citing an “obligation of secrecy … even if the person concerned has personally made the matter public”.

A Migri spokeswoman, Melanie Soini, said its decisions were based on “up-to-date … information” about the situation in Russia and enclosed examples of questionnaires it sent to Russian authorities.

Migri monitors “what kinds of problems returnees may have encountered” in Russia in the past, generally speaking, she said.

But she confirmed that once a person had been returned to Russia, Migri did not follow up on their well-being.

“Monitoring applicants’ situation after a decision has been issued to them does not fall within the competence of the Finnish Immigration Service (FIS),” Soini said.

EU ignorance?

And if the FIS had done its homework, then it would know that not a single Russian prosecuted for “treason” – a charge which Belov faced – has been acquitted since Putin came to power 26 years ago.

There was “a limited understanding of what is happening in Russia and the full extent of its repressive machinery”, Belov said.

German immigration authorities also appeared naïve.

Ponomarev said his appeals had been rejected even though he had openly supported anti-Putin groups deemed to be “extremists” by the regime, such as the Anti-Corruption Foundation of assassinated Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.

His anti-war posts had seen his social media accounts blocked by Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office and he had been interviewed by German media at one pro-Ukraine rally in Berlin while holding a sign saying: “Putin, drop dead”.

The German judge who rejected his appeal said his work with ‘extremist’ groups was merely “technical”.

“But Russian law doesn’t differentiate between degrees of participation in ‘undesirable’ or ‘extremist’ organisations. Any involvement is a criminal offence,” Ponomarev said.

The judge also recommended that “I just delete all my [social media] posts, restrict access to my accounts, and delete my [protest] photos,” he added.

“But if you do a basic reverse-image search on the internet, my [‘Putin, drop dead’] interview pops up instantly … If I can easily find all mentions of myself using simple, publicly available tools, I think the FSB has more advanced capabilities,” he said.

“It’s also a known fact that pro-Kremlin or FSB-linked individuals frequently attend protests here in Germany, especially near the embassy, taking photos for facial recognition,” Ponomarev said.

“For the bureaucrats here, if you aren’t officially on a wanted list, you aren’t in danger,” he said, before quoting the Russian saying: “Come back when you’ve been murdered”.

And Burakova from Ark corroborated his take.