Earlier this month, eight EU member states publicly called on the bloc’s leadership to tighten visa regulations for Russian citizens who served in the country’s war in Ukraine. In a letter to European Council President António Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, leaders including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned that the war was creating longer-term internal security risks for the Schengen free-movement area, and argued that once demobilised or rotated out of the war zone, Russian soldiers might attempt to travel to the EU, where they could potentially contribute to a rise in organised and violent crime.

“Individuals who have participated in the war as part of the armed forces of the aggressor state pose serious internal security risks, including through violent crime, organised criminal networks, extremist movements or hostile state activity in the broader context of Russia’s hybrid action,” the letter said. “Among them, there are more than 180,000 previously convicted criminals who were recruited from Russian prisons and sent to the front.”

Indeed, the number of visas being issued to Russian citizens continues to rise despite the war in Ukraine, with 80% of the approximately 670,000 Schengen visa applications made by Russian citizens last year being granted, a figure that makes Russians one of the five nationalities granted the largest number of EU visas. 

“Any entry may therefore have serious consequences for the security of a Member State or the entire Schengen area,” the open letter continued, before its authors urged the European Commission to prepare “targeted amendments” to the EU’s Visa Code “or other appropriate instruments with a view to enabling a coordinated European approach”.

That said, the EU has significantly tightened access to the bloc for Russian citizens since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and most Schengen visas are now issued for shorter periods and with more limited validity.

Transit asylum

The new rules could make life much more difficult for deserters from the Russian army seeking refuge in Europe. Many of them, however, initially settle in Armenia, which Russians don’t require a visa or even an overseas passport to enter. 

Oleg Lapshin*, a Russian former serviceman currently living in Yerevan having deserted the Russian military, says that the initiative being taken by EU leaders would leave deserters with less room for manoeuvre, though he remains confident that countries such as Armenia would “continue to take people in” even if Europe no longer does. 

“If the EU completely restricts entry for those involved in the war without vetting them, without a hearing, without consideration of the individual merits of each case, then that is regrettable. People who are aware of this but still wish to desert the Russian army will take this into account, and it’s likely to be one of the factors deterring them from deserting.”

At the same time, Lapshin concedes that the European Union has the right “to regard us all as criminals and refuse us all entry”, though he stresses that such an approach wouldn’t lead to anything good, as the aim should be to encourage desertion in order to reduce Russia’s military capabilities.

Anastasia Burakova, founder of The Ark, notes that military personnel in Russia generally don’t hold foreign passports — either they’ve never been issued one, or they surrendered it to the authorities upon enlisting This inevitably plays an important role in how deserters choose a country to flee to. Russian citizens can only enter Armenia, Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan without an international passport. However, the latter two are far less safe, with a higher risk of extradition or abduction.

“In the context of deserters, it is not easy to get anywhere; people maim themselves, shooting themselves in parts of their bodies, so that they can flee the front via a hospital. Armenia does not take any steps towards actual extradition, so staying there is safer, but due to the lack of a land border, fleeing to Armenia is more difficult than to Kazakhstan,” Burakova says.

The path to Europe

Most military deserters are determined to get as far away as possible from Russia, and tend to view well-established destinations for anti-war Russians such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia as being too close to Russia both politically and geographically to be safe. 

One of those who initially fled Russia to Armenia is Alexander Polyakov*, who had enrolled in a military academy at the age of 18 as he was unable to finance a university education. After graduating in 2021, Polyakov joined the Russian army as a professional soldier, and in early 2022 was sent to Russian-annexed Crimea for what he had been told were military exercises, but which turned out to be preparations for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

On 24 February, he found himself crossing the Ukrainian border with his unit and being on the front line, where he says he immediately realised that the Russian military was totally unprepared to fight a war. Assigned to work in military communications, Polyakov was constantly moving between positions under fire and narrowly escaped death on multiple occasions. After several months of the war, he decided to leave the army for good and, having been granted leave, returned to Russia.

When mobilisation was announced in September 2022, it became clear that he would soon be sent back to the front, and so Polyakov bought a flight to Kazakhstan, where he lived in fear for the next two years. Being wanted by the Russian authorities, Polyakov only used cash and rarely went outside, fearing arrest or extradition.

During that time, however, he got to know human rights activists and other deserters, and began helping to verify the stories of Russian soldiers who had also fled the army. Eventually, he began to speak out publicly against the war and got involved in various human rights initiatives alongside a group of deserters from the Russian military.

After a year and a half of negotiations, Polyakov and five other deserters from the Russian army were eventually granted laissez-passer documents allowing them to fly to France, where they applied for political asylum upon arrival.

Polyakov’s case is not unique. Before the war, Kamil Maksimov* was studying to be an astronomer, worked as a technician and had no plans to join the military. That all changed in 2023, however, when he was detained on drug charges. According to him, he was given a choice: go to prison or enlist to fight. He reluctantly agreed to sign a military contract, hoping that he’d have the opportunity to desert once deployed.

After completing his basic training, Maksimov was sent to the front in the Donetsk region, where he was soon wounded and transferred to a unit he describes as a “suicide battalion” for troublemakers. Realising he would soon be sent back to the frontline, Maksimov decided to desert and shot himself in the foot. After recovering from his injury at a hospital in Russia, he absconded to the city of Kazan once he got wind that his redeployment was imminent. 

Still recovering from his self-inflicted injury, Maksimov spent several months in hiding during which he barely left the house. As soon as he was well enough, he fled Russia through Georgia, where he decided to claim asylum in France. Upon arrival in Paris, he told his story to an immigration officer, applied for political asylum and was given a temporary document allowing him to live in the country, access healthcare and receive benefits.

Polyakov now lives in Nice, where he’s learning French and hoping to find a job. He says that for the first time he can remember, he feels at ease and no longer fears being stopped on the street and sent back to the front line.

Justice for deserters

According to Grigory Sverdlin, who heads Get Lost, an underground organisation assisting Russian soldiers to desert, the number of requests his NGO receives is continually rising and has seen a 30% increase so far this year alone. In January and February, Get Lost helped 248 Russian servicemen to desert and go into hiding.

Sverdlin says that the security concerns raised by some EU leaders about Russian deserters being granted asylum in Europe are unfounded. “The war has been going on for four years; a number of Russian deserters have been in Europe for a long time, yet I haven’t heard of a single case of one of them committing a serious crime.”

Though he says he fully supports the “thorough vetting of applicants and preventing those involved in the invasion from entering the Schengen area” per se, he warns that it all depends on how such a policy is implemented.

Noting that around 85% of those supported by Get Lost never saw active combat in Ukraine, and weren’t even in the occupied territories, Sverdlin wonders whether those reviewing asylum applications in Europe will consider such details or simply refuse anybody who has ever been in the Russian army. He suspects the latter approach is more likely to prevail.

“It would be right to create a separate track for Russian deserters and conscientious objectors to obtain refugee status. These people risk being imprisoned in Russia, and if they’re found to have deserted their units they face up to 15 years behind bars,” Sverdlin says. “Establishing a working procedure for deserters to obtain political asylum would increase the number of deserters from the Russian army and thus help Ukraine.” 

Earlier this year, InTransit, an organisation that assists Russians being persecuted for political reasons to leave the country, told Novaya Europe that attitudes towards Russian deserters in Europe had noticeably hardened even since the early years of the war in Ukraine. Northern Europe in general and the Baltic states in particular don’t generally accept Russian military deserters, and have even, in some cases, forced them back across the border, InTransit said.

Only a few countries — such as Germany, France and Spain — consider asylum claims made by deserters in a relatively objective manner, according to InTransit, though there are only a few dozen cases of this happening, while the majority of Russian deserters remain in transit countries such as Armenia.

According to Anastasia Burakova, the founder of The Ark, an NGO that supports anti-war Russians living in exile, Estonia has already introduced a ban on issuing visas to Russians who fought against Ukraine. “Last summer, the Baltic and Nordic countries met to discuss such a measure. Overall, this is a step towards individual, rather than collective, responsibility and an assessment of the danger to society. I think other EU countries may soon adopt this approach,” Burakova warned in January.

At the same time, The Ark and Get Lost are currently discussing proposals to allow exceptions to be made for former Russian soldiers who did not commit war crimes and often didn’t even reach the front line, and for those who fled the country before they could be drafted, or were conscripted against their will. “Such people often become key witnesses in investigations into war crimes,” Burakov notes. 

Deserting an army committing war crimes will in time be understood as a brave moral position, of course, something demonstrated by the monuments that stand in Hamburg, Cologne, Hanover and Vienna today in honour of those who refused to serve in the Wehrmacht during the Nazi era.

“It would be good to treat people who refuse to fight against Ukraine fairly, right now,” says Sverdlin, “rather than erecting monuments to them in 50 years.”

*Names have been changed for safety reasons