‘Even a strong case can fall apart’

How the EU’s migration reform made political asylum effectively impossible for Russians to obtain

For almost three months now, new asylum rules have been in force across the European Union. Because asylum applications by Russians are approved at a rate that falls below the EU’s newly established threshold of 20%, applicants from the country can now be fast-tracked via an accelerated procedure — leaving them far less time to gather evidence of persecution or appeal a rejection. Experts say political refugees will bear the brunt of the consequences. Novaya Gazeta Europe looks at how the EU’s asylum system changed this summer, and what Russians seeking protection are now up against.

The reform of the century

On 12 June, the EU’s revamped asylum system, the Asylum and Migration Management Regulation (AMMR), officially came into force. The reform had been in the works for nearly two decades, effectively since the bloc took its modern shape following eastward enlargement and the 2009 Treaty of Lisbon. European institutions signed off on the creation of a Common European Asylum System (CEAS) in May 2024; now, two years later, the new rules have taken effect.

One of the main changes is that asylum seekers are now sorted at the EU’s external border after a seven-day preliminary screening. Anyone judged to have a low chance of receiving international protection is funnelled into an accelerated procedure meant to last no more than three months. That includes people who refuse to provide required information about themselves, nationals of countries the EU has designated “safe”, and nationals of countries where the approval rate is below 20%. According to Eurostat, Russia now falls into that last category: in 2024, just 18.1% of Russian applicants were granted protection.

There are currently few countries that clear the 20% bar. The highest approval rates belong to citizens of Afghanistan, Venezuela, Somalia, Eritrea and, going by pre-regime-change figures, Syria, where protection is granted in 80–90% of cases. Ukrainians are largely untouched by the reform, since they remain covered by temporary protection status. Belarusians also still see approval rates well above those of Russians.

Another fundamental change is the repeal of the so-called Dublin III regulation. Previously, an asylum claim could only be lodged in the first EU country a person entered. Under the new system, asylum seekers are redistributed among member states so the burden doesn’t fall disproportionately on countries on the bloc’s external border, such as Italy or Greece. Germany’s interior minister, Alexander Dobrindt, called the reform a step toward “order and control” in migration policy.

States will, however, be able to opt out of taking their allotted quota of asylum seekers by paying compensation instead — roughly €20,000 per person. That money is meant to go to countries willing to take in additional refugees. It remains unclear, though, what happens if most states simply choose to pay rather than take people in.

Criticism and concerns

The new system already has plenty of critics. Some argue migrants will still simply move from border reception centres deeper into Europe. Rights advocates, on the other hand, worry people will now be held in migrant facilities for months, effectively incarcerated.

Another problem is the lack of shared record-keeping standards. As in many other realms, all 27 EU states collect and report data differently, and the criteria used to classify applicants vary from country to country. That makes even the approval rate, which is now the figure that determines whether someone gets the accelerated or the standard procedure, difficult to calculate with any precision.

Daria Dudley of the Berlin-based initiative Demokrati-Ja and of Reporters Without Borders, shared her own numbers on just how narrowly Russia missed the cutoff.

“My rough average for 2025 came out to 19.74%,” she said. 

“The irony is that if just 42 more persecuted Russians had been granted asylum in EU countries last year, Russia would have climbed out of the ‘grey zone’ and wouldn’t have fallen under the restriction on 12 June.”

“Doing this arithmetic, I learned a lot — for one thing, that Eurostat’s database is a nightmare,” she added. “The site looks like it hasn’t been updated since the 90s, and finding the right figures on it is basically impossible.”

The spread between countries, meanwhile, remains enormous: in some, fewer than 10% of Russian applications are approved; in others, as many as one in four are.

The real problem with the new system isn’t so much its speed as its rigidity, says Margarita Kuchusheva, a human rights advocate with the Russian Anti-War Committee’s Consuls project.

“Plenty of cases — in Germany, for example — genuinely take a year, two years, sometimes longer to process,” she explains. “Over that time, a person has a chance to build their case, track down documents, get support from NGOs or lawyers. Now, instead of a detailed review that weighs every factor, applicants face a narrow checklist of questions and criteria they have to fit into.”

“If someone doesn’t have sufficiently convincing evidence at the moment of their interview, even a strong case can fall apart. Appeal deadlines are being shortened too. And in Germany, quite a lot of appeals succeed precisely because courts often find that the agency overlooked something or reviewed a case too superficially.”

Dudley points to another innovation that could potentially screen out a substantial share of the flow of Russian refugees from the outset.

“The provisions on third and ‘safe’ countries are especially worrying. The new approach makes it easier to refuse to examine a case in the EU if the applicant is found to have had ‘a connection to another country’.”

That standard could be interpreted broadly enough to affect nearly every Russian applicant, she notes, since so many have spent time in Georgia or Armenia, or arrived via Turkey. According to Dudley, even well-documented victims of political persecution could lose their case — not because their story is doubted, but because of formal errors: an inaccurate date, an imprecise description of their entry route, or missing paperwork at the time of the interview.

The reform itself adds another layer of difficulty: the new Pact is an extraordinarily complex web of interlocking regulations, cross-references and exceptions that even lawyers struggle to untangle. That inevitably widens the scope for administrative discretion — or arbitrariness — at every level, from the officers conducting initial screenings to migration agencies and courts.

The broader political climate is only adding to the unease. Amid a general hardening of migration policy, some EU states are already openly discussing asylum centres located outside the bloc. Italy, for instance, has built two such facilities in Albania. With little information leaking out about conditions inside them, rights advocates fear the AMMR could end up spawning something close to an EU-wide network of “concentration camps lite”, outsourced to neighbouring countries.

Even before the reform, the process of obtaining conventional political asylum in the EU was extremely difficult. For this reason, among the broader wave of Russians, Ukrainian and Belarusians relocating to the EU in recent years, only a small share have gone this route. In practice, anyone with meaningful savings, in-demand professional skills, solid language ability, or connections anywhere in the region has tended to pursue other kinds of residence permits instead.

Novaya Europe asked several people who did come as political émigrés to describe what the asylum process actually looks like.

Stanislav and Alexander (Netherlands)

“I’m 38. My partner and I left and applied at different times. We left in September 2022 — not just because of mobilisation, but everything at once: mobilisation, another round of anti-LGBT legislation, and the final straw was a drone that got shot down and landed on the neighbouring dacha while I was there on ours. We spent four days in a queue at the Kazakhstan border — they were only letting a handful of people through each day. It’s sad, obviously, having to abandon everything — only two days passed between deciding to leave and actually leaving — but the situation demanded it at the time.

Our journey to the Netherlands was a complicated one. We weren’t heading toward somewhere so much as away from somewhere. There was no plan; every decision got made as we went. We’d been living in Voronezh for the last couple of years before we left, so flying wasn’t an option — we went overland. In Kazakhstan we realised the country was overwhelmed and we needed to keep moving, so after that came Uzbekistan, a year in Turkey, Montenegro, Serbia. It was only in Serbia that I decided we’d go to the Netherlands and request protection. We flew into Schiphol in December 2023.

Having dealt with Russian officials, we expected this to be an incredibly frustrating process, and were surprised by how we were treated. ... Everyone seemed genuinely willing to help and support us.

I’m now more than 2.5 years into the procedure, still waiting for my second interview, but at this point I can’t picture myself anywhere else. I live in a suburb of Rotterdam. We work, we rent a place, and we’re just waiting for the interview so that, once we have status, we can finally start making even medium-term plans.”

Daniil and Alyona Smetansky (France)

“I’m 26 now, my wife is 24. I'm an activist from Petrozavodsk, in Karelia. My wife and I fled Russia in March 2025 after I received direct threats of persecution from a security services officer, specifically someone from the Centre for Combating Extremism.

Our route to France went Russia–Turkey–Georgia–Turkey–France. We had to make a detour because we were waiting on a German humanitarian visa in Georgia, but Germany suspended issuing humanitarian visas in summer 2025, and the organisation helping us, InTransit, offered us a French humanitarian visa instead. We got the visa in February 2026 and filed for asylum in France on 1 April.

All the caseworkers we dealt with were unfailingly polite — after Russia, it was almost a culture shock. The main problem with them is that they're not always well-informed. Sometimes a refugee who's read enough immigration chat groups knows more about the procedures than they do, and we've had to argue our case for things like getting a discount card or regional transport access. We spent several days going back and forth with our caseworkers, providing documents and articles proving our rights — but in the end, they do their job.

Right now we're waiting for our interview with OFPRA, the agency handling our case, and we don't need a lawyer for this stage yet. We live in Bordeaux, in New Aquitaine, in public housing.

We heard about the tightening of the rules around the end of May. We got lucky and filed before 12 June, so we're under the old procedure, and we're hoping people who'd already applied won't be affected by the changes. We think the changes themselves are unjust — there are very few emigration routes for anti-war Russians, and waiting for a humanitarian visa took us almost two years. That's a brutal amount of time, during which you experience everything from despair to depression.”

Ivan Demidenko and Alexey Suetin (Spain)

“I’m 27 and my partner is 34. I left in the summer of 2022, right after the war started. I'd spent years doing activist work and working at an NGO focused on informal education. We worked in accordance with the principles of nonviolence, democratic process, and tolerance. I'm gay, and in my work I spoke openly about LGBT issues in Russia and about feminism. I fled the country because I was facing criminal prosecution. I run a blog about LGBT life that has a few thousand followers.

I went to Georgia first, then came to Spain with my boyfriend in the autumn of 2025 on a tourist visa. I'm from Krasnoyarsk. My partner is from Moscow — he left during mobilisation, crossing into Georgia via the Lars checkpoint. At the end of 2025 we got a police appointment and received a document confirming our intent to apply for asylum on LGBT grounds; that's different from the filing itself. We were then given a date to file and be interviewed, in spring 2026. We only actually filed in May 2026, and got the main document confirming us as asylum seekers.

The police officers we dealt with were very courteous. We don't have a lawyer yet, but you can request one for free through local NGOs — though the queues are long, and it can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to actually get one.

The biggest headache was getting a police appointment in the first place. We used four phones and four SIM cards for it. In our region, you can only call on one specific day of the week, at a specific time. It took us two weeks of nonstop calling to get an appointment. And then there was the language — we didn't speak it at all when we were going through all this. We understand a bit more now, but we're still far from being able to hold a real conversation.

We'd heard about the tightening of EU rules, so we tried to get in before it hit. In our case we got lucky and made it in time, so we didn't run into any of those problems. Next we're planning to get a free lawyer to help strengthen our case and submit documents to the ministry. Based on what we've heard in LGBT refugee chat groups, the average wait for a decision is up to two years."