For some Russians, political asylum in the EU remains one of the only ways to be safe. But along the way they often encounter unforeseen circumstances. The BBC traveled to Croatia, which annually has one of the lowest approval rates for asylum applications in the EU. And he tells how political persecution in Russia itself can become a formal reason for refusal, and a refugee camp can turn out to be not such a safe place.
On the evening of December 8, 2022, when it was already getting dark, a man with a hiking backpack was walking across a deserted bridge over the Danube River. This 825 meter long bridge is located on the border of Serbia and Croatia and serves as a border crossing between them. 29-year-old Russian Vladislav Arinichev was heading to Croatia to seek asylum there.
A cold wind was blowing over the Danube and it was drizzling - winter was beginning in the Balkans. Arinichev walked alone - during the entire journey, only a few cars passed him.
“I was tormented by the thought that I was finishing some important stage of my life and starting another, no less important,” he recalls. “I walked and thought about it, looking at the river.”
At the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Vladislav Arinichev was working as an electrician in Moscow. In the first weeks of the war, he managed to receive two administrative fines - for discrediting the Russian army and for calling for sanctions against Russia. Arinichev became the first to be fined under this article - a case was opened for his video “Arinichev V.V. against the war in Ukraine,” which at that time had 183 views on YouTube.
Having come to the attention of the police, Arinichev, who had been involved in activism before the war and published his photos from Alexei Navalny’s rallies on social networks, decided not to tempt fate. In May 2022, he flew to Georgia, and from there he thought of going to Europe. He did not have a Schengen visa, and, having decided to enter the EU through the land border from Serbia, he flew to Belgrade at the end of the year.
On the other side of the bridge, where the Croatian checkpoint booth stood, he was met by three smiling border guards. “Hello, I am seeking international protection. I’m from Russia,” Arinichev told them in English.
“Everything is fine, don’t worry,” one of the border guards answered him. They poured him hot tea and asked if he wanted to call his family. A reel of cable was rolled to the chair on which he sat down - he was finally able to stretch his legs after a long journey and dozed off.
Soon he was woken up - the arriving police interrogated Arinichev, checked his documents and phone number, took his fingerprints and explained how to get to Zagreb, the Croatian capital, where the camp for asylum seekers is located.
“Where will you go next?” - one of the policemen asked him.
“Nowhere,” answered Arinichev. — I'm in the European Union. I'm safe."
But in practice everything turned out to be much more complicated. Croatia joined the European Union in 2013, becoming the bloc's outer border. Just two years later, due to the war in Syria, Europe faced its largest migration crisis since World War II, with more than 1.2 million refugees arriving in the region. This became a great stress for Croatia, through which one of the main routes to the EU by land passed.
At that time, the majority of refugees crossing the Croatian border were Syrians, Afghans, Iraqi citizens and people from North Africa. After the 2015 crisis subsided, the national composition of migrants changed.
Since 2022, Russians have been among the top three in terms of the number of asylum seekers at the Croatian border, and for the last year and a half they have been in first place there, according to data from the Croatian Ministry of Internal Affairs.
The main Croatian accommodation center for asylum seekers, Porin, is located on the outskirts of Zagreb. It used to be a hotel, but in 2011 it was turned into a refugee camp. The layout remains the same - several four-story buildings, all rooms are equipped with the same balconies. There is furniture, bags with things, children's bicycles.
In the camp, Arinichev met Russians who left immediately after the start of the war. At that time, in Porin, according to him, there were “about 50 people”, “they were in a rather depressed state.”
“The mood was below par. People said: there is no work, there are no options, no one is being given asylum. We’ve been here for six months, the war is going on, nothing is happening,” recalls Arinichev.
In order not to fall “into this emotional hole,” he began to study what opportunities he had in Croatia. I met human rights activists who help refugees. I signed up for language courses provided free of charge by the Red Cross. He took part in anti-war actions in Zagreb, where he met the local Russian and Ukrainian communities.
“In Porin I met many people who, in just a few months, turned into “professional refugees.” They arrive, they are told: here is the bed, here is the dining room. Free food, accommodation and WiFi - and after some time a person loses the sense of normalcy, that everything in life costs money, that you need to work and do something,” Arinichev complains. “Fearing this, I began to keep myself busy.”
At first, Arinichev made money by collecting bottles around the camp and then handing them over. This is what many of the guests of Porin do - they are provided with housing and food for free, but the refugee allowance is only 20 euros per month.
On his fifth month in Croatia, Arinichev found his first job - as an electrician at a construction site. And soon he moved to another job - as an electrician-tester in a company producing electrical appliances.
Having quickly learned Croatian, Arinichev began helping other Russian-speaking residents of Porin communicate with the camp administration, write a resume and advise where to go and with what problems. Thanks to his activity, he quickly became famous among his compatriots, says Arinichev:
“People are like: we’ve been sitting here for a year and can’t find a job, but he’s already found a second one. How did you do this?!”
Along with the opportunities, Arinichev gradually began to learn about the problems that refugees face in Croatia. It turned out that it is very difficult to obtain asylum in the country. In 2025, according to the country's Ministry of Internal Affairs, 14,928 people declared their intention to request asylum in Croatia at the country's border, including 3,227 Russians. But only 1,236 people reached the official application procedure. However, Croatian authorities approved asylum for only 24 people throughout last year.
For most refugees, Croatia becomes a transit country - they do not stay there for long and, even before the first interview for asylum, leave for other, larger EU countries. In Porin, such asylum seekers are called “tourists” - “they will arrive for a day or two and move on,” says Arinichev.
The country's Ministry of Internal Affairs also admits that refugees do not stay in Croatia. The head of the department and Croatian Deputy Prime Minister Davor Bozinovic said in May that in 2026, 4,366 people expressed their intention to seek asylum in Croatia, of which 428 people submitted an official application, and only two received a positive decision.
People who left Croatia for the EU are trying to apply for asylum again. But there is a risk that they will be sent back to Croatia under the Dublin Regulation, an EU law under which the first country through which a person entered the EU is responsible for processing an asylum application.
Over the past year, 1,364 people were deported from other EU countries to Croatia via Dublin, 572 of them from Germany.
But Arinichev had no intention of leaving Croatia. He developed a “feeling of security” in the country and didn’t want to disturb “Dublin,” he says.
In addition, his risks in Russia increased - in June 2023, he learned that the Russian authorities had added Arinichev to the Rosfinmonitoring list of terrorists and extremists.
“I immediately wrote an official letter to Rosfinmonitoring - why the hell did you add me there?! And they answered me that a criminal case had been opened against me under the article about justifying terrorism,” he recalls (the BBC has a screenshot of the answer).
The case was opened either for anti-war videos on YouTube or for old posts on VK, Arinichev believes, but does not know the exact reason. In November 2023, he was arrested in absentia by the Lefortovo Court of Moscow, and his VK page was blocked at the request of the Prosecutor General's Office.
Arinichev was confident in his chances for asylum and believed that with the new criminal case they only increased.
In the summer of 2023, the number of refugees in Croatia increased sharply, partly because the Balkan route is easier to overcome in warm weather.
The Porin camp was overcrowded. There were not enough rooms for all those who arrived, and people, including children, began to be placed right in the corridors of the camp. There was also not enough space for everyone in the dining room, and food began to be distributed to take away in disposable containers. The floors were littered with garbage.
“This lasted four months,” says Arinichev. — We cleaned everything ourselves because the cleaners quit. But everything accumulated and accumulated, and in September it became completely unbearable.”
Arinichev decided to bring the conditions in the camp to the attention of the authorities. “When you start helping people, their problems become, to some extent, your problems because they affect our entire community,” he says. “And when more and more people were brought to our camp, naturally, I began to criticize the administration.”
On September 10, he walked through the corridors of Porina with his phone camera turned on, and then posted the video on YouTube. “It looks like a disaster, and it is a disaster,” Arinichev commented in the video in English and showed corridors with refugees sitting on the floor, dirty mattresses laid out on the floor close to each other, some without bed linen, scattered things and garbage.
Arinichev sent the filmed video to the Croatian Commissioner for Human Rights, the police, and through human rights activists he knew, contacted the Croatian media.
In the same month, employees of the Croatian Ombudsman’s office came to Porin for an unscheduled inspection. They confirmed the unsatisfactory conditions of detention that Arinichev complained about.
The ombudsman's report stated that on the day of the inspection there were 892 people in the camp, with a maximum capacity of 600. Arinichev himself claims that “at the peak” of overpopulation there were up to 1,000 people in the camp, but this figure was not officially stated.
“Applicants [for international protection] were exposed to hygienic, medical and other risks, especially infectious diseases due to frequent itching and the presence of bedbugs,” the Ombudsman’s Office stated, noting that the investigation into conditions in the camp began precisely after Arinichev’s complaint.
A week after the inspection, the situation in Porin improved, says Arinichev: “They cleared everything out, transferred people somewhere, and it became possible to live in the camp; there were no more people in the corridors. That is, somehow they were able to solve a problem that they could not solve for four months.”
“But the camp administration has since then harbored a very strong grudge against me,” he adds.
That same month, an employee of the Croatian Ministry of Internal Affairs came to Arinichev’s camp. The policeman told Arinichev that his video from Porin showed the faces of other refugees, and by publishing the video he was jeopardizing their safety in Croatia.
On the same day, he deleted the video from the camp from his YouTube and re-uploaded it again, blurring out people’s faces. He admits he was wrong to not do it right away, but says he only filmed the hallways to show conditions in the camp. After the video, he said, some refugees thanked him and no one complained.
In November 2023, he was summoned by the police for an interview regarding his asylum application. It was short (the BBC has the protocol). Arinichev was asked why he was on the Rosfinmonitoring list of terrorists and extremists and why he published a video from Porin with the faces of other people.
Arinichev was shocked that the police connected these two facts of his biography. He informed the Croatian authorities about the register back in the summer, when he learned that he was included in it.
“But I couldn’t even imagine that they would connect terrorism with the filming of Porin,” he says.
At the end of the interview, the police informed Arinichev that the Croatian Security and Intelligence Directorate (SOA) considered him a threat to the country’s national security and was blocking a positive decision on his application.
“My YouTube is generally very successful,” Arinichev jokes. — The first video is immediately an administrative charge in Russia, then a criminal offense for justifying terrorism, and for the video from Croatia the mental intelligence services consider it a threat to the national security of Croatia. That is, my YouTube is very much like that, concentratedly criminal.”
Arinichev began to study who else had encountered a similar problem. “I learned that this is not a mistake, but a systematic work to combat people who seem not entirely trustworthy to the Croatian intelligence services,” he says. “They see a complex case and, in order not to understand, they simply write: a threat to national security. It sounds scary, and it’s difficult to sue against it. I learned that many Chechens are locked up in deportation prisons.”
People whom the Croatian intelligence services recognize as a threat to national security are most often Muslims, confirms Luka Kos, a lawyer and project coordinator for the Croatian human rights organization Peace Research Center.
“We have seen many cases where people from the North Caucasus received this status. Although we do not have access to SOA intelligence, we consider this practice discriminatory,” he explains.
The BBC is aware of at least one mobilized person who fled the Russian army and sought asylum in Croatia, who was declared a threat to national security a year ago. Among the documents confirming the danger in Russia, he had a summons, a criminal case about unauthorized abandonment of a unit, and information about the search. But he was sent to a Croatian prison and after a month and a half was deported to a third country with a ban on entry into the EU for five years.
At the beginning of 2024, Arinichev met in Porin the wife of Chechen Akhmed Takanaev, who at that time had been in a deportation prison for eight months. He connected the girl with human rights activists and journalists who wrote about their family in a Croatian newspaper, and in July of the same year he went out on a solo picket in support of Takanaev in Zagreb, “to draw attention to the illegal deportations of Russians.”
“I went out to protest because I knew that I would be next, that they would come for me too, deny me asylum and deport me,” he says. “I really didn’t want this, and the only thing I could do was go to the square, talk about these cases and protest.”
He went to the picket wearing a “Fuck SOA” T-shirt, and he was detained right during the protest, after which the court sent him under arrest.
