Former Wagner fighter fears deportation from Norway. Human rights group believes sending him to Russia would lead to another ‘brutal killing.’

The former Wagner Group commander Andrey Medvedev, who is now seeking asylum in Norway, has been moved to a migrant detention center and fears an imminent deportation to Russia. According to the human-rights advocate Vladimir Osechkin, sending Medvedev back to Russia would almost inevitably lead to another “brutal killing” by the Wagner Group.

According to the Norwegian news outlet NRK, Medvedev is now in custody at the detention center in Trandum, Norway. Until now, he was “voluntarily” housed at an undisclosed location in Oslo — but in conditions that, according to Medvedev himself, led to a conflict between him and the security officers, who allegedly wouldn’t let him come out on the balcony or lock the bathroom door while in the shower.

Medvedev’s attorney Brynjulf Risnes told The Guardian that his client’s refusal to stay at the designated address meant that the authorities had to decide whether to let him go — or detain him.

Vladimir Osechkin, founder of the human-rights group Gulagu.net (the organization’s name translates as “no to gulag”), is trying to draw international attention to Medvedev’s case and the certainty he feels that, by deporting Medvedev, Norway would assist his “brutal killing.” “Yesterday,” Osechkin writes,

the security service took Medvedev out “for a walk,” inviting him to board a boat to visit some uninhabited island and “walk around.” Andrey had no phone connection and couldn’t even call his attorney Risnes. He became afraid that he’d be taken to an island where the Russian security service or Wagner Group personnel might forcibly take him from. Andrey refused to board the boat to sail into the unknown.

“Deporting him to Russia will lead to a brutal killing and Andrey’s death,” Osechkin insists. “We aren’t whitewashing Medvedev,” he goes on:

He has done a great deal of wrong in his life. But his eyes have opened up, he understood this, and he is ready and willing to cooperate with the world, the international investigators, and the Norwegian authorities. He wants to live and to testify against the grossest violations of human rights and crimes against humanity — military and other crimes — committed by Evgeny Prigozhin and his accomplices.

“Finally, this is a precedent,” Osechkin writes, suggesting that Medvedev’s case, however difficult, is a test of the European justice system and its capacity to stay humane.