Sept. 23, 2024

A black-and-white image of Vladimir Putin, split in two.

Credit...Pool photo by Alexander Kazakov

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By Lilia Yapparova

Ms. Yapparova is an investigative reporter at Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet. She wrote from Riga, Latvia.

In November 2022, my editors asked me to be careful about what I ate and stop ordering takeout. Initially, I didn’t think much of it. But I soon realized the importance of their advice when, just one month later, my colleague Elena Kostyuchenko discovered she had been poisoned in Germany, in a probable assassination attempt by the Russian state.

Such stories have become routine. Last year, an investigative journalist, Alesya Marokhovskaya, was harassed in the Czech Republic; in February, the bullet-riddled body of a Russian defector, Maxim Kuzminov, was found in Spain. In both cases, the Kremlin was assumed to be involved. Russian opposition figures know well that even in exile they remain targets of Russia’s intelligence services.

But it’s not just them who are in danger. There are also the hundreds of thousands of Russians who left home because they did not want to have anything to do with Vladimir Putin’s war — or were forced out, accused of not embracing it enough. These low-profile dissenters are subjected to surveillance and kidnappings, too. Yet their repression happens in silence — away from the spotlight and often with the tacit consent, or inadequate prevention, of the countries to which they have fled.

It’s a terrifying thing: The Kremlin is hunting down ordinary people across the world, and nobody seems to care.

I’ve been gathering information about Russia’s targeting of exiles since the start of the war in Ukraine. My sources range from people who themselves survived abductions and surveillance to the leaders of Russian diasporas around the world — and the few human rights activists helping them. Many spoke to me on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss Russian repression without fear of reprisal. The Kremlin, of course, denies any involvement — mostly saying that it cannot comment on what is happening to people in other countries. But the evidence is piling up.

There’s a vocal coach arrested in Kazakhstan at Moscow’s request who went mad in a local jail. A caregiver for the elderly detained in Montenegro on Russian orders, carried out by Interpol. A schoolteacher detained by Armenian border guards after telling her students about Russia’s crimes in Bucha. A toy shop owner, an industrial climber, a punk rocker: These are some of the people caught in the Kremlin dragnet, all over the world.

And it is a truly global operation. In Britain, exiles are being followed and London opposition events are crawling with agents “who stick out like a sore thumb,” Ksenia Maximova, an anti-Kremlin activist there, told me. Russian intelligence officers have been sent to monitor the diasporas in Germany, Poland and Lithuania, according to Evgeny Smirnov, a lawyer who specializes in treason and espionage cases. Other emigrants have been stalked and threatened in Rome, Paris, Prague and Istanbul. The list goes on.

Some of the methods are especially insidious. Lev Gyammer, an exiled activist in Poland, has been receiving texts for two years, supposedly from his mother. “Levushka, son, I miss you so, when will you visit me?” Another reads, “Son, I’m waiting for you. Come back soon.” He ignores them: His mother, Olga, died five years ago. Another Russian expatriate — whose elderly parents are still alive and very sick — chose to believe it when his parents’ nurse of many years told him, over the phone, of a fire in their apartment. He rushed home from Finland and was immediately taken to prison and tortured, according to Mr. Smirnov. Of course, there never was a fire.

Those who cannot be tricked back to Russia are subjected to surveillance. An employee of an organization that supports L.G.B.T.Q. people was walking her dog around the neighborhood in Tbilisi, Georgia, when she noticed that she was being followed by a drone. It was an evening in early May — two years since she’d fled Russia with the rest of her colleagues. She hurried back to hide at her apartment but could still hear the buzzing. She followed the noise to the balcony and came face to face with the device, hanging there within arm’s reach.

Host countries are often complicit. In some places, local police officers even conduct surveillance on behalf of their Russian colleagues. In Kazakhstan, local special services are helping Russia catch draft dodgers. In Kyrgyzstan, the police are using facial recognition technology to search for those wanted by the Kremlin, forcing people to leave cities for the mountains, according to a host of advocacy groups. When not actively assisting Russian surveillance, the local authorities are sometimes slow to stop it.

This was the case with Sergei Podsytnik, a journalist investigating military links between Russia and Iran. In March of this year, still elated by the news that a drone factory he’d uncovered was getting sanctioned, he was returning to his room in Duisburg, Germany. Before going into exile, Mr. Podsytnik was part of Alexei Navalny’s opposition network and picked up the habit of making sure he wasn’t being followed. Outside his door, he casually glanced over his shoulder — and saw, peeking out from around the corner, a stranger following his every move.

Mr. Podsytnik’s colleague also noticed that he was being watched by the same man, but it took them two appeals to secure an investigation from the local authorities. The police in Duisburg simply could not comprehend that it was possible for Russia-sponsored surveillance to be happening in their town, it seemed. The case was soon closed without finding the offender, which might’ve been a mistake. Duisburg is one of the places, according to the Dossier Center, a London-based research organization, from which agents of the Russian military intelligence unit have carried out sabotage abroad.

Mr. Podsytnik is safe now, but not everyone has been so lucky. Exiles who’ve experienced similar surveillance sometimes end up disappearing without a trace — be it from the doorstep of an embassy in Armenia or a rural church in Georgia — only to turn up in Russian detention centers. It is impossible to gauge how often this is happening. Yet we can assume, my sources say, that there are many more cases like that of Lev Skoryakin, who was taken from his hostel in Kyrgyzstan last October, shoved into a car and deported back to Russia. We just don’t know about them.

Many Russians abroad are vulnerable and lack protection. In the summer of 2023, civil society groups petitioned the European Parliament to help with the legalization of people who refused to fight in Mr. Putin’s army; there was no meaningful response. Political asylum is routinely denied not only to draft dodgers but also to activists — sometimes “with monstrous arguments that ‘the situation in Russia is normal and you can count on a fair trial,’” Margarita Kuchusheva, an immigration lawyer in Cyprus, told me.

Antiwar exiles are supported by a handful of human rights organizations, perennially on the brink of closing because of lack of funds. Russia, by contrast, lavishes a great deal of resources on the exiles — as it accuses them of treason and terrorism and, driven by paranoia, pursues them all over the world. They are at immediate risk. But the greater danger is that the world forgets altogether about these people — and why they left their country in the first place.

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Lilia Yapparova (@lilia_yapparova) is a special correspondent at Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet.

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