ORAL, Kazakhstan -- The West Kazakhstan regional court has rejected an appeal filed by Russian citizen Igor Sandzhiyev against a lower court's refusal to grant him asylum.
Sandzhiyev's lawyer, Yury Kobzarev, said the ruling will be appealed with Kazakhstan’s Supreme Court. Kobzarev added that his client has the official status of asylum seeker and therefore cannot be deported to Russia.
Sandzhiyev, who left a military unit in Russia's Volgograd to avoid taking part in the war in Ukraine and illegally crossed the Russia-Kazakh border, earlier told RFE/RL that he fears deportation to Russia once he exhausts all appeals, saying he may face arbitrary arrest and persecution back home.
In early May, the Bokei district court in Oral, the capital of the West Kazakhstan region, rejected Sandzhiyev's request for asylum and handed him a suspended six-month prison term after finding him guilty of illegally crossing the border.
Sandzhiyev has said he is against Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. He said earlier that a quarter of the 200 mobilized men in the military unit where he was recruited for military training fled amid disorder and heavy alcohol consumption.
He also said that the training was just marching and learning the Military Code by heart.
Sandzhiyev said he fled the unit in November and managed to go to Belarus first but was arrested there and deported to Russia's Volgograd, where he was placed under supervision of the local military enlistment center. But he managed to flee again.
In December, Kazakh authorities extradited an officer with Russia's Federal Security Service, Mikhail Zhilin, who fled to Kazakhstan, where he unsuccessfully tried to get political asylum to evade recruitment to the war.
Three months later, a court in the Siberian city of Barnaul sentenced Zhilin to 6 1/2 years in prison after finding him guilty of desertion and illegally crossing the border.
After President Vladimir Putin announced a partial military mobilization in September to support Russia’s armed forces involved in the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, thousands of Russian citizens fled the country for Kazakhstan, Armenia, Georgia, Mongolia, and other nations bordering the Russian Federation.