For human rights NGOs, this is a real breakthrough: six deserters from the Russian army in Ukraine were granted temporary residence permits in France while awaiting the outcome of their application for asylum. All come from Kazakhstan, where they fled during 2022 and 2023, their story is successively told by several Russian-speaking media, including the Russian-language services of the BBC and of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE-RL). “This is the first time that an entire group of Russian defectors has been able to obtain European visas and apply for asylum in the European Union. Previously, human rights activists knew of only one case where a Russian defector in Kazakhstan was able to obtain a European visa,” underlines RFE-RL.
In a long investigation, published on October 11, the Russian-language service of British broadcasting says that their flight to Europe was the fruit of the work of an entire chain of organizations of human rights defenders: the association Russian (clandestine) Idité Lessom (“The Call of the Wild”), the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights (KIBHR), InTransit in Germany and Russia-Libertés in France. Finally, we learn that the first
Swiss
