“Come home, we will crucify you”

A family of Russian oppositionists with five children is being deported from Sweden.

Olga Rogachevsky, a chemist from Yekaterinburg, together with her husband Alexei and five children, the youngest of whom is now only six years old, left Russia after the outbreak of war. They publicly expressed their anti-war point of view, which caused them problems at work.

“I am a pacifist and generally do not accept any military conflicts, much less attacks on fraternal people, because every Russian has close and distant relatives in Ukraine. After the war, we were in a very stressful state, and we decided to leave, because we couldn’t change anything in Russia,” Olga told ASTRA.

According to her, Sweden was the only country where they could most quickly obtain visas and enter legally. In June 2022, they crossed the border and applied for asylum. A few months later, immediately after the start of mobilization, they were refused. Olga and her husband filed an appeal, which was considered for another six months.

“In fact, migration clerks do not have a document according to which they should evaluate Russians who opposed the war. In fact, they rely on outdated documents, according to which there is no war,” Olga says.

Olga says that she and her husband still found a way to suspend the decision on their deportation, but 11 months later they were still ordered to leave the country.

“On August 1, I was absolutely illegally put in jail. I am an asylum seeker, all my documents are legal, but I have not been released since then. I lived in a migration shelter, came, extended my asylum seeker card. I was where I was supposed to be. If they suspected that I would run away, they should have obliged me to register to come. But they missed this point and just arrested me, separating me from five children,” Olga told ASTRA.

A review of the decision to place her in a pre-trial detention center in early October did not yield anything.

“I am in the leaked FSB Oppositionists database because I have a small journalist job. I wrote articles about anti-war organizations that are banned in Russia. I participated in rallies and demonstrations, wrote a book, and ran a telegram channel in which I told how to get asylum. Provocateurs write to my husband from the FSB,” Olga shares.

She says that asylum seekers from Belarus were deported before her eyes, against whom a criminal case has been initiated. According to Olga, the son of this family was arrested immediately at the border, and his mother is out of contact.

“Right now I’m just afraid for my life, because the last paper says that nothing threatens us, there is no war in Yekaterinburg, everything is fine, the FSB will not touch us. And my interview was posted on YouTube, there are 1100 comments. 80 percent of them — come home, we will crucify you,” says Olga.

Olga has now created a petition, in which he asks the Swedish authorities to prevent her deportation.

The Scandinavian countries have repeatedly denied political asylum to Russians. For instance, the Russian Pavel Suetin left Severomorsk for Norway and applied for asylum in the city of Vadse, but in September 2024 the Norwegian migration Agency informed him that he was not eligible for asylum and had to leave the Schengen area within three weeks. Another Russian, Stanislav Brysin, was refused asylum in Sweden, despite the experience of holding protest actions and an open criminal case on “calls to terrorism.” ASTRA wrote that in search of refuge, Brysin boarded a boat and sailed towards Ireland. Before that, Sweden deported a family from Belarus, against whom a criminal case was opened in their homeland.

The situation with shelters in the United States is no better. So, in the material about American migration prisons, ASTRA told the story of an opposition journalist from Russia with an administrative sentence for “discrediting the army”, whom the US authorities deported back t Russia and handed over to the FSB.