Chechen activist awaiting extradition to Russia attempts suicide in Kazakhstan detention centre

Chechen activist Mansur Movlayev, who fled Russia in 2023, has attempted suicide in a pretrial detention centre in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where he had been awaiting extradition to Russia, his lawyer told Novaya Gazeta Europe.

Movlayev received timely medical care and his life is not in danger, the Russian Anti-War Committee said.

Movlayev left a suicide note explaining his decision. “Forgive me, I’m tired of injustice. Neither the court nor the prosecutor’s office will listen to us! They will torment me, torture me and kill me,” he wrote, referring to Kadyrov’s security forces, “and then say I did it myself. I won’t let them torture me anymore. For 16 months I lived with fear of extradition and with hope… Now there is only fear!”

He asked to be buried in Kazakhstan so that Kadyrov’s forces would not get even his body, and asked for help for Yulia Yemelyanova, a Russian activist held in the same detention centre who also faces extradition to Russia.

Movlayev, who faces extortion charges in Russia but has denied the allegations, has been held in Almaty on an extradition warrant since May 2025. A court extended his detention by five months in July until 13 January 2027. Kazakhstani authorities denied him refugee status on 26 December 2025, and in January the country’s deputy prosecutor general approved Russia’s extradition request. Russia had assured Kazakhstan that the case against Movlayev was not politically motivated and that he would not be tortured if returned. Kazakhstan’s Cassation Court upheld the asylum denial in September.

Yemelyanova, a former volunteer for the late opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s St. Petersburg office, was detained at Almaty airport in August 2025 while flying from Georgia to Vietnam. Kazakhstan approved her extradition and courts denied her asylum claim, though her removal has been suspended while her lawyers’ appeal to the Cassation Court is pending. Russian prosecutors accuse her of stealing a taxi driver’s phone in 2021, an allegation she denies. Human rights advocates have noted that the theft complaint was filed a month after the alleged incident, and that Yemelyanova says she first saw the phone in question at a police station.