German contradictions overshadow welcome for Russian army deserters

They came for Nikita at 6.30am last Tuesday, ringing the bell and banging on the apartment door in an eastern Berlin tower block.

Alone in the flat, the 25-year-old didn’t answer the door. Through the spyhole he saw six people in street clothes outside and, waiting with a van below, what looked like two uniformed police officers.

In February 2022, three days before Russia invaded Ukraine, the Russian man fled his home near Novosibirsk. When his call-up papers arrived at his father’s home last August, he was living and working in Poland. Fearing deportation and forced service in the Russian army’s war of aggression, Nikita fled last April and sought church asylum in an eastern Berlin parish.

For his supporters here, however, Nikita’s case has exposed a growing contradiction: between political promises of support for conscientious objectors like him, and a tougher approach by immigration authorities towards church asylum.

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This allows a German parish to offer material and legal support to an asylum applicant and, in cases like Nikita’s, run down the clock on the EU’s so-called Dublin rules. These rules require arrivals to file an asylum application in the first EU member state they enter – in Nikita’s case, Poland.

Because Poland has a record of deporting deserters back to Russia, however, the plan was for Nikita to spend six months in church asylum in Berlin and then file a fresh asylum application for which Germany would be responsible.

While chancellor Olaf Scholz says he is “in favour of offering protection” to deserters, Germany’s legal stance remains unclear in practice.

The federal interior ministry (BMI) says Russian deserters and conscientious objectors are entitled to apply for asylum, but has no numbers on how many applications have been filed – nor on how many have been successful.

Meanwhile a senior BMI official said last month that Russian call-up papers were not enough to secure asylum in Germany. Citing unnamed ministry sources, the official said Russia had so many volunteer soldiers that it was no longer pursuing mandatory draft policy or punishing returning deserters.

“It is complete hypocrisy,” said Christiane Meusel, Nikita’s lawyer. “If people like Nikita go to war they are war criminals and if they don’t, they are viewed as slackers only out to save their own skin.”

After dismissing his initial asylum application under Dublin rules, Berlin’s state immigration authorities sent a letter last month ordering Nikita to leave Germany immediately. Otherwise, he was ordered to attend a meeting on September 7th and, in the intervening months, not to leave the Berlin metropolitan area.

Nikita’s Berlin helpers say they are as confused by the letter as they are by a separate letter, from the same asylum authority to senior church authorities, rejecting Nikita’s church asylum application.

[ Russia raises upper age limit for conscription to bolster soldier numbers ]

“It is our parish that has offered him church asylum so they should be contacting us, not the church authorities,” said Sven Täuber, a Lutheran pastor in eastern Berlin. “We’re in this for the long haul and hope Nikita sticks it out. But it’s difficult for him to learn German, meet people or do anything productive.”

For 40 years Germany’s church asylum system, though not offering explicit legal protection, has been “respected” by German immigration authorities as “an expression of a Christian humanitarian tradition”.

With 425 active church asylum cases in Germany involving 685 people, concerns are growing at pushback against church asylum and its future under any new EU asylum rule book.

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“There is a growing gap between what German politicians are saying here and what state authorities are doing,” said Ms Meusel. “Migration bodies are tightening up their practices – but they wouldn’t be doing that without a political signal to do so.”