A man from the Russian region of Kalmykia has been granted asylum-seeker status in Kazakhstan after he left a military unit to avoid taking part in the war in Ukraine.
Kazakhstan's Bureau for Human Rights wrote on Telegram on April 19 that Igor Sandzhiyev, from Kalmykia's capital, Elista, was given the status after the bureau became involved in his situation.
Sandzhiyev told the Mgorod.kz website that he is currently in Kazakhstan’s western city of Oral, where he received asylum-seeker status from the local department of labor and social security on April 13.
Sandzhiyev added that he is looking to obtain refugee status in Kazakhstan as his current status of asylum seeker is valid for three months only.
Officials at the department of labor and social security in Oral said a special commission will decide on Sandzhiyev's status within three months.
Sandzhiyev emphasized that he is against the war in Ukraine. According to him, a quarter of 200 mobilized men in the military unit where he was recruited for military training, fled due to 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 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. Despite the supervision, 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 for the war in Ukraine.
Last month, 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 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.