By Lawrence S. Wittner
According to a September 3, 2025 article in the Guardian, during June and August, U.S. immigration authorities deported approximately 80 Russian asylum seekers, shackled and handcuffed, to Egypt. Upon arrival, they were forced by Egyptian and Russian authorities onto ICE planes heading for Moscow, where they were immediately turned over to the FSB (the dreaded Russian Federal Security Service).
Among these asylum seekers was Andrei Vovchenko, a former Russian soldier who, in October 2022―the first year of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine―fled his military post rather than fight in Putin’s war and made his way to the United States. After the Trump administration ignored his asylum appeal and deported him to Moscow, he was immediately arrested and confronted with a 10-year prison term. “He begged not to be put on the plane to Moscow,” a witness recalled, but Egyptian police “restrained him and tied him up.” Bound to his seat, “he cried the entire way from Egypt to Moscow.”
“People in need of protection, fleeing Putin’s war and dictatorship, FSB torture and repression, have ended up in US prisons, dressed in orange jumpsuits and shackled during transfers like criminals,” observed Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian human rights activist. “Some of them have been handed over to the FSB and other security services. This is cruel and shameful.”
Currently, about a thousand Russians are seeking asylum in the United States. Given the U.S. government’s indifference to their fate, prominent Russian opposition figures in exile (including Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Putin’s murdered presidential rival, Aleksei Navalny) have called upon the Canadian government to grant asylum to Russians currently subject to deportation orders, and specifically to those whose antiwar activities are clear. Otherwise, they warned, the Trump deportation policy “threatens to destroy the lives of many decent and innocent people.”
And there are enormous numbers of Russians who have defied the Putin regime by opposing the Russian military conquest of Ukraine. Beginning on the evening of February 24, 2022, the date of Russia’s full-scale military invasion, many thousands of Russians staged nonviolent antiwar demonstrations across their nation. On that first night alone, the police made 1,820 arrests of peace demonstrators in 58 Russian cities. As the demonstrations continued, prominent cultural figures and politicians spoke out against the war, a million Russians signed an antiwar petition, and Russian soldiers began refusing to fight in Ukraine.
Infuriated by the resistance, the Russian authorities responded with mass arrests (19,478 during 2022 alone), huge fines, violence, and new laws providing 10 years imprisonment for spreading “fake” news and 5 years for “discrediting the army.” Putin denounced “the scum and the traitors” who opposed the war and promised that the Russian people would “spit them out” like insects that had flown into their mouths.
As the first year of war moved on, Russia’s mass antiwar movement did decline. One reason for a loss of momentum was the intense repression by the Putin regime. But massive pro-war propaganda and activists’ gathering sense of futility also played a role in dampening public activism. In addition, vast numbers of Russians, appalled by the war or unwilling to participate in it simply fled from their homeland – with estimates ranging from 600,000 to 1.3 million departing during 2022 alone.
Even so, in subsequent years, smaller peace demonstrations continued to worry the Russian authorities. In February 2024, there occurred a protest against military mobilization by the “Path Home” movement in Moscow and a protest against military service near the “Black Tulip” memorial in Yekaterinburg. That September, the “White Scarves” (relatives of mobilized soldiers) held an antiwar demonstration outside the Ministry of Defense building in Moscow. In these cases and in others, the security forces made arrests of participants and, also, of the journalists who covered the events. According to OVD-Info, a leading Russian human rights organization, “as of 17 February 2025, we are aware of 1,185 people facing criminal prosecution for anti-war statements or actions.”
Also, courageous individuals continued to speak out publicly against the war and the regime. The opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, for example, who had somehow survived two apparent poisonings by the regime in previous years, was charged with spreading false information about the Russian army in Ukraine and, subsequently with high treason over a series of public speeches he made that criticized Kremlin policies and the Ukraine war. In 2023, in his final speech to the court, Kara-Murza struck a defiant tone, declining to ask for acquittal and saying that he stood by everything he had said. “I only blame myself for one thing,” he declared. “I failed to convince enough of my compatriots and politicians in democratic countries of the danger that he current Kremlin regime poses for Russia and for the world.” Kara-Murza, designated a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, was thereupon sentenced to 25 years in a strict regime penal colony.
In September 2024, after 11 months in solitary confinement, Kara-Murza was awakened in his cell at 3 a.m. and marched outside, convinced that he was about to be executed. Instead, it turned out that he was part of a large prisoner swap with Russia arranged by the Biden administration. Soon, he was winging his way westward to safety.
It’s a shame that the Trump administration, through its treatment of courageous Russian war resisters and other dissidents, has reversed the process.
Dr. Lawrence Wittner, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).
