When Nikita Romanov was called by the Russian army, he immediately thought it was suspicious. They wanted to check his records and asked him to come in for an interview, even though it had been ten years since he’d been in the service.
“I’m not crazy. It was clear to me that they would force me to sign a new contract,” says the 30-year-old Russian. “I feared that they might send me to Ukraine to fight.”
Romanov did not want to participate in “the tragedy of our generation”, he says in a conversation with the NOS outside the asylum seekers’ center in Ter Apel. That is why he and his younger brother – who took part in protests in Russia and criticized the government – fled to the Netherlands last month.
Just like more than eighty other Russians, figures from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND) show today. Before the war, there were about twenty Russian asylum applications a month, often from activists or Russians with an LGBTI background. But since the start of the war in Ukraine, the climate in Russia has hardened, with draconian laws imposing prison terms of up to 15 years on statements about the “special military operation.” As a result, many more people no longer feel safe there.
One of those Russians is Pavel Avraamov, who fled the country with his wife and daughter. He met Romanov and his brother in Ter Apel, where he and his family are waiting for his asylum application. Avraamov was politically active in Moscow and spoke out against the war on Facebook, he says in this video:
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