In early September, activist Yulia Yemelyanova, who was linked to Alexei Navalny’s штабs and helped Russian political prisoners, was detained at Almaty airport in a politically motivated case opened in Russia. Her lawyers applied for asylum and challenged the extradition request. As Novaya Gazeta Europe notes, this is not the first time Russians wanted by Moscow on interstate warrants have been detained in CIS countries.
The newspaper’s interviewee, anarchist Denis Kozak, said that in Kazakhstan a detainee is usually held for three days in a temporary facility, then after a largely formal court hearing is jailed for 40 days, and once documents arrive from Russia, for 12 months counted from the day of detention. According to him, extradition cannot be decided before a final ruling on an asylum request, although Kazakhstan rarely grants refugee status.
Kozak was detained in February 2023 after Russia accused him of “justifying terrorism” over a VKontakte comment about Mikhail Zhlobitsky’s self-detonation at the entrance to the FSB building in Arkhangelsk. He spent the first 40 days alone in the medical unit and then about ten months in a shared cell with other people awaiting extradition, including political prisoners from Uzbekistan.
He says that after media coverage of political detainees, detention center officials more often apply psychological pressure than improve conditions. Kozak also described a protest by eight prisoners over cuts to water, electricity and outside communication. He said that after they refused to return to their cell, officers used force against them and later tried to accuse them of attacking staff, but the case was dropped after body camera footage was reviewed.
“When the day of my release came, on February 9, 2024, I was told there were no documents. Later it turned out they had simply lost track of me: on paper I was listed in another block,” Kozak said.
After his release, he collected documents from the German consulate, completed the paperwork needed to leave Kazakhstan and departed for Germany. He says he now lives in Germany, works at a metal structures processing plant, continues his activism and helps Pavel Vladimirov and Yulia Yemelyanova, who are under arrest in Kazakhstan.