Speaking up for the voiceless: Russian activists struggle to defend the rights of migrants amid wartime conditions

Доступно на русском языке

Growth of state-sponsored xenophobia

According to official data from Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, 6.3 million immigrants arrived in the country in 2024 — the highest number since 1995. About half of them came in search of work. At the same time, immigrants have become one of the main targets of Russian propaganda (especially after the Crocus City Hall attack of March 22, 2024), with former president Dmitry Medvedev and Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin numbering among the government’s most notable xenophobes.

The fight against migrants in Russia is not limited to rhetoric alone. At the end of 2024, the State Duma passed several anti-migrant laws, including a ban on nongovernmental institutions issuing Russian language proficiency certificates. The state also instituted tougher penalties for “organizing illegal migration” or providing fictitious residency registrations.

Starting from Feb. 5, 2025, police were granted the right to deport foreign citizens without trial for offenses as mild as drinking alcohol in public places, “promoting nontraditional relations,” and possession and use of drugs. The following day, the Ministry of Internal Affairs launched a registry of “controlled persons” — migrants who had been found guilty of violating the law. Being placed on this list effectively amounts to “social death”: people have their bank accounts blocked and lose access to most public services. In essence, they are left with little choice but to leave Russia.

After the registry was launched, human rights defenders began receiving a flood of complaints from people whose data had been mistakenly entered. Valentina Chupik, head of the migrant rights center Tong Jahoni (“Morning of the World”), reported that in just a few days more than 200 people had approached her.

The screws have only tightened since then. On Sept. 1, 2025, Moscow and the Moscow region introduced an “experimental system for tracking the whereabouts of foreign citizens,” modeled on the “Social Monitoring” system used during the coronavirus pandemic. Migrants are required to install the Amina mobile app, which automatically transmits their location data to the authorities.

If a foreign citizen fails to connect for more than three days, they are automatically deregistered at the migration center and may be added to the above-mentioned registry of “controlled persons.” At present, Amina is available only for Android devices. On the app’s page in RuStore, users have been posting numerous complaints that Amina refuses to accept uploaded photos or that it displays incorrect geolocation.

Migrants are also required to complete an integration course — one that strongly recommends that they avoid participating in protests, show respect for the Eternal Flame, and not to address strangers as “brother” or “sister.” A separate section is devoted to the benefits that the Russian Empire and the USSR allegedly brought to Central Asia.

The most notorious measure was the ban on admitting children with insufficient Russian language skills into Russian schools (the corresponding law, drafted under the supervision of State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, was adopted in December 2024). The test assesses knowledge of spelling, the ability to maintain a conversation, and to retell a text. To pass, students must complete 90% of the tasks. A retake is allowed only after three months.

For a child to be admitted to testing, parents must submit an extensive package of documents in Russian, or with a notarized translation. In practice, the overwhelming majority of applicants are screened out at this stage. In mid-May, Volodin wrote that of the 1,762 people who applied for testing, 1,427 had their documents rejected. According to the Duma Speaker, this result “shows that lawmakers did the right thing by supporting this bill.”

“Most families were unable to cope even with the first stage of this test, which involves passing a bureaucratic review, due to various kinds of paperwork issues,” sociolinguist Vlada Baranova told The Insider. “When we hear the phrase ‘illegal migrant,’ we usually picture someone who has secretly crossed into our country, but most often it refers to people whose registration has expired or whose medical insurance was issued in the wrong place. The law effectively cuts children off from schools through an enormous pile of paperwork.”

Those who do manage to overcome the bureaucratic barrier are then screened out by the test itself. In St. Petersburg and Yugra, for example, half of the children failed the exam; in Novosibirsk, one-third did; and in Yekaterinburg, fewer than a quarter passed — 15 children out of 65.

Against this backdrop, the authorities are seeking to tighten restrictions even further. The State Duma is considering a bill that would make school education fee-based for all children of foreigners and limit the number of Russian language test attempts to three per year.

Russian courses from activists

While the state denies migrants integration, civic activists are trying to help. For many of them, human rights violations and repression are a personal pain that drives them to act.

Moscow politician Sergei [name changed] recounted in a conversation with The Insider how he once personally witnessed an anti-migrant raid — a spectacle he described as the height of “dehumanization.” According to Sergei: “It looked like an anti-terrorist operation with police vans, people in body armor carrying automatic weapons and forcing everyone who didn’t look like a ‘typical Aryan’ face-down on the ground and treating them like criminals. They could hit you, scream at you. And the main thing is that the police don’t care at all whether you’re legal or illegal. It’s enough that you’re not Russian.”

Sergei emphasizes that after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 — and especially after the Crocus terrorist attack of March 2024 — helping migrants has become dangerous because of state pressure and attacks by domestic neo-Nazis. Nevertheless, Sergei and his like-minded colleagues decided to open free Russian language courses for children who hold foreign citizenship.

The activists found a space for classes and enlisted teachers willing to work on a volunteer basis. They plan to start lessons this fall, and for now volunteers are trying to draw the immigrant community’s attention to the initiative. To do so, activists distribute flyers near metro stations, at markets, and in Central Asian tea houses. They also seek direct contact with representatives of diasporas.

“There are thousands of children who need help, and at first we’ll only be able to help dozens,” Sergei says. “But that’s better than helping no one, and I think we have prospects. One of our main problems right now is distrust from migrants, which is understandable too: they’re used to being treated poorly, and suddenly these Good Samaritans appear. But I think over time we’ll build trusting relationships, and in the future the need for organizations like ours will simply disappear.”

A similar educational project operates in St. Petersburg. Most of the students are children of people from Central Asian countries, but there are also Russian citizens — for example, Kalmyks and Dagestanis, who also often face difficulties with socialization when moving to major cities in Western Russia.

“The problem of socialization is very serious,” says Leonid [name changed], a consultant for the project on the religions and cultures of Central Asian countries. “For someone arriving from the provinces of Turkmenistan, it’s completely unfamiliar that here men and women ride the bus together, girls speak to boys first, or that a person might not belong to any clan or tribal group. It’s hard for us to imagine the depth of cultural shock they experience.”

After the adoption of the language testing law, project participants realized that children risked being left without schooling altogether. They reoriented the program toward a more advanced study of Russian and began urgent preparation for some students to take the exams. With limited resources, they decided to prepare only those who showed sufficiently strong academic potential.

Of the 14 children attending classes at the time, six met that criterion. At the same time, Leonid insists that on an everyday level, all of the children attending their courses know Russian. The problem is that this is not enough to pass the test:

“If it were just an exam to check conversational skills, there wouldn’t be an issue. But the test is difficult: it doesn’t measure vocabulary, it measures understanding of context, which isn’t easy to master when you’re learning a foreign language. I’ve worked as a tutor for a long time and I know children often struggle to properly convey the meaning of a text, even if Russian is their native language. Not every Russian from the provinces could pass this test. Migrants without special preparation simply cannot pass it. They refuse to take it because it’s unrealistic.”

The test is not designed for children whose native language is not Russian, confirms sociolinguist Baranova. “These tasks test, for example, knowledge of orthoepy or the declension of complex compound numerals,” she says. “Russian-speaking children themselves often don’t master such norms and don’t use them in everyday life, but they learn them at school. And the higher the grade a child is applying to, the more of these specifically difficult tasks appear.”

Nevertheless, of the six children who took the intensive course, five passed and were admitted to Russian schools. Volunteers plan to use this year to prepare the remaining teenagers to pass in time for the start of school in 2026.

An artificial problem

The Insider’s interlocutors contend that politicians deliberately exaggerate the scale of the problems associated with migrant children studying in Russian schools. According to studies by the Ministry of Education, foreign citizens make up about 1.5% of pupils in the country (250,000 out of nearly 18 million).

In the past, the state itself successfully helped immigrants socialize and learn the language. From 2006 to 2016, Moscow had 11 “Russian Language Schools” for children of foreign citizens. Even those starting out with no foundation in the language often showed positive results. However, the program was eventually shut down due to lack of funding.

In some regions of Russia, charitable foundations have attempted to fill in the void. In the Kaluga and Novosibirsk regions, the Odinakovo Raznye (Equally Different) foundation runs programs that train teachers and principals to work with children known in pedagogy as “non-native speakers” — a correct term for children facing a language barrier. The charity Deti Peterburga (Children of Petersburg) also helps prepare migrant children for school.

The actions of the Russian state lack any consistency, Leonid believes. On the one hand, the authorities allow businesses to bring millions of labor migrants into the country, many of whom arrive with their families. On the other, they deprive these children of the only available form of socialization.

The language law is criticized even by government officials. Tatarstan’s head Rustam Minnikhanov called the restrictions foolish and stressed that children are not to blame for not knowing Russian. He noted that, with motivation and sufficient help, the language can be learned “in three to four months.”

How adult migrants are saved from deportation

For a long time, the Russian state has branded assistance to migrants of any age as hostile activity. As far back as 2015, the authorities designated the Civic Assistance organization, which had been helping displaced people since the collapse of the USSR, as a “foreign agent.” At the end of 2022, the organization’s head, Svetlana Gannushkina, was personally added to the list. In 2021, the founder of the Tong Jahoni human rights center, Valentina Chupik — who fled Uzbekistan in 2005 after the Andijan massacre and received political asylum in Russia — was deported.

Chupik now lives in the United States and continues her activism, providing migrants with free legal aid. For example, in August of this year, Tong Jahoni activists rescued a group of people from Tajikistan who had been held in forced labor in Russia since late March.

According to Chupik, border guards at the airport confiscated the migrants’ passports and handed the documents over to their “employers.” The latter took the group to a factory in the Moscow region and declared that they would have to work until each had repaid 40,000 rubles for “processing” and another 10,000 rubles a month for housing — with 24 people crammed into a single room.

The migrants managed to contact human rights defenders. Chupik filed a complaint with the Investigative Committee, while Moscow volunteers from Tong Jahoni went to the site and made a scene outside the kidnappers’ windows. The police who arrived fined the exploiter for illegal employment. The migrants were nearly deported but eventually managed to stay under an amnesty that allowed all people who entered the country without proper documentation to regularize their status Sept. 10.

Despite the relatively happy ending, Chupik explains that the case represents a classic example of human trafficking:

“Back in Tajikistan they sign a contract saying they are going to work and will be provided with housing. Once here, their passports are taken away and they are forced to work at factories, construction sites, fish and meat plants, or shopping centers — barely earning enough to feed themselves. The average term of such a labor contract is five to six months, but it varies. In my practice, there have been cases where people were held in slavery for eight years, and others where we managed to free them in two days. Those taken to the Moscow region were lucky — they might have ended up in a timber plant in Irkutsk region, from which it’s not so easy to get to the city.”

The human rights defender says deportation and her forced relocation to the United States have made her work far more difficult. Not every judge agrees to let a lawyer assist a defendant via WhatsApp, and new restrictions mean such calls now have to be made through a VPN or using international phone lines.

Things are hardly easier for activists on the ground. Chupik’s Russian colleagues continue to help migrants as best they can, but they face increasing pressure:

“Our staffer from Kyrgyzstan was detained and intimidated by the FSB three times, and once her husband was detained as well, after which she quit and left the country,” Chupik recounted. “Our Uzbek lawyer had his dacha stormed by security forces — they smashed his window even though the door was open. All our employees are regularly threatened in police stations and courts. They are told they’ll be deported or have something planted on them, or that they’ll just ‘disappear.’”

In May 2024, two neo-Nazis carried out a rampage at Tong Jahoni’s Moscow office. After showing up for a training session, they began shouting Nazi slogans and smashing furniture and equipment. The police did not respond to the incident, and the landlord requested that the aid organization vacate the premises, saying he did not wish to have to deal with such problems again.

The most widespread and blatant abuse of migrants’ rights remains police violence:

“People are beaten, detained, left without food, water, or access to a toilet, kept outside in the cold, or, conversely, locked in basements. In 99% of cases this is done to extort a bribe. Police violations are on the rise. After the tightening of migration policy in February, new reports started appearing with claims like, ‘used obscene language and waved his arms in a public place’ — without any evidence. Anyone who refuses to pay a bribe is then deported.”

However, these reports are often poorly drafted, and in nine out of ten cases, human rights defenders are able to successfully challenge them.

The situation is more difficult when it comes to school and kindergarten enrollment refusals, where assistance succeeds in only 35–40% of cases. Valentina Chupik believes that migrants coming to Russia for work generally should avoid bringing their children, as they end up in conditions wholly unsuitable for them:

“Recently, a woman from Uzbekistan asked me why her child wasn’t being admitted to kindergarten. I began explaining the law, and she replied that it was unfair. I had to tell her that fairness is not exactly something you find in Russia.”