ORAL, Kazakhstan -- A court in Kazakhstan has rejected a request for political asylum filed by a man from the Russian region of Kalmykia who left a military unit in Russia's Volgograd to avoid taking part in the war in Ukraine.
A court in the Western Kazakhstan region on May 3 also handed Igor Sandzhiyev a suspended six-year prison term after finding him guilty of illegally crossing the Russian-Kazakh border.
Sandzhiyev told RFE/RL that he would appeal the ruling, but added that he feared deportation to Russia if he exhausts his appeals.
Igor Kochetkov of Kazakhstan's Bureau for Human Rights told RFE/RL that if deported, Sandzhiyev, who is from Kalmykia's capital, Elista, could face arbitrary arrest and persecution in Russia.
Sandzhiyev has said that he opposed Russia's invasion of Ukraine. He said earlier that a quarter of the 200 mobilized men in the military unit where he was training fled amid the disorder and heavy alcohol consumption in the unit.
He also said that the training was just marching and learning the Military Code by heart.
Sandzhiyev said he fled the unit in November 2022 and managed to go to Belarus first, but was arrested there and deported to Russia's Volgograd, where he was placed under the supervision of the local military enlistment center but he managed to flee again.
In December, the Kazakh authorities extradited an officer with Russia's Federal Security Service, Mikhail Zhilin, who failed to get political asylum to evade recruitment to the war in Ukraine.
In March, 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 to support Russia’s armed forces in the invasion of Ukraine in September, thousands of Russian citizens fled the country for Kazakhstan, Armenia, Georgia, Mongolia, and other countries bordering the Russian Federation.