The Insider: Generating pushback: Eastern European countries are turning away political asylum seekers from Russia and Belarus:

In August 2025, Polish border guards returned a 16-year-old Russian citizen to Russia after he attempted to seek political asylum. The case became known in October, when criminal proceedings against the teenager reached a Russian court. The incident is part of a larger trend. By 2025, European Union countries bordering Russia and Belarus have effectively closed themselves to political asylum seekers.

<…> The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly ruled that a refusal to examine an asylum request can qualify as a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees protection from inhuman or degrading treatment. In one such case involving Chechen families who tried to enter Poland in 2016 through the Terespol border crossing, the court found that Polish border guards systematically refused to accept their applications and sent them back to Belarus. The applicants included women and children who explicitly cited the risk of torture in Russia. The court ruled that the border guards’ actions deprived the asylum seekers of access to international protection and thus violated Article 3 of the convention.

Stefania Kulaeva of the Memorial Anti-Discrimination Center told The Insider that pushbacks are not merely a human rights violation, but effectively a denial of the very concept of asylum.

“People have the right — in cases of political persecution — to cross a border in any way at all, even in a suitcase or by parachute, as people once crossed between East and West Germany,” Kulaeva said. “What matters is that a person has reached the territory of a country that recognizes refugee rights and that they have grounds to seek asylum. Everything else is legally insignificant. But border guards are afraid of this: they do not want a person to become an asylum seeker in Europe, so they try to get rid of them. In any case, this violates the very idea of refugee rights. It is a violation even when some procedures are formally observed.”

Human rights defenders interviewed by The Insider agree on one point: in the early 2020s, pushbacks on the EU’s eastern borders were a formally prohibited practice that were nonetheless occasionally used. After the migration crisis on the Belarusian border with Lithuania, Poland, and Latvia, they first became an “emergency measure” and later began to be embedded in legislation.

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