On January 12, Estonia barred entry to people who fought in Ukraine as part of the Russian armed forces. Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said 261 Russian servicemen had already been placed on Estonia’s blacklist and added that the list would grow. He said those who took part in the war have “no place” in Estonia or the Schengen area.
As journalists from Vot Tak later clarified, the ban also applies to deserters who fled the Russian army. Joosep Kaasik, deputy secretary general of Estonia’s Interior Ministry, said the restrictions cover them as well. Estonian authorities say the policy is based on security concerns: in their view, former war participants may be psychologically traumatized, have criminal records, be hostile toward Europe, and be vulnerable to recruitment by Russian security services.
The full scale of desertion remains unclear. According to an investigation by Important Stories published in May 2025, from the start of the full-scale war through the end of 2024 there were 49,000 recorded cases of desertion or unauthorized absence. In August 2025, The Insider reported that 18,470 people had been convicted in Russia on such charges, not including sentences handed down in occupied parts of Ukraine. Rights advocates stress that the real number of those who left the war may be higher.
Representatives of the InTransit and Get Lost projects, which help people avoid deployment or leave Russia, say Estonia’s move was not unexpected. According to them, the Baltic and Nordic countries had already signaled earlier that they were unwilling to admit Russian war participants, including deserters. They say the region uses pushback practices, and Lithuania has written such a mechanism into law.
Get Lost says that of the more than three thousand people it has helped, about 60% remain in Russia in hiding, while another 40% have left, mainly for Armenia and Kazakhstan, which can be entered without an international passport. Only a small number manage to reach the European Union. According to InTransit, France, Germany, and to a lesser extent Spain handle such asylum claims relatively fairly, but the total still amounts only to dozens of cases.
Rights advocates say the route to Europe has become much harder. Deserters often try to reach EU countries in transit through third states, but because of first-safe-country rules and tighter controls, that path now works far less often. InTransit says that since the summer of 2025, airlines, especially Lufthansa and Air France, have increasingly refused boarding to passengers they view as likely to request asylum during transit.
Most such Russians are now believed to be in Armenia, where their number may already be in the thousands. Yet their status there also remains precarious. The people interviewed by Novaya Gazeta Europe say that, overall, Europe’s attitude toward Russian deserters and other asylum seekers has become harsher than it was in the first year of the war: amid a rightward political shift and changes in migration policy, the chances of receiving protection in the EU have diminished.