Law Enforcers Are Fleeing Russia En Masse
- 29.11.2025, 17:09
They are already testifying in The Hague.
With the onset of full-scale aggression against Ukraine, Russian police officers and representatives of other security agencies began fleeing to the West. Some are already actively testifying about how Putin's regime is organizing repression.
In an interview with the "We can explain" project, the founder of the "Sitting Russia" foundation, human rights activist Olga Romanova told about this. These are FSIN officers (prison officers - note), high-level investigators, and prosecutors. Probably dozens have passed through me. I am now constantly working with five," said the human rights activist.
According to Romanova, the highest-ranking representative of the Russian repressive apparatus who fled to the West (of which she is aware) is an investigator for especially important cases of the Central Office of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation (something like the State Bureau of Investigation in Ukraine). This fugitive investigator is currently writing a thesis at a British university on human rights activism in the Russian Federation.
- Four high-ranking FSIN officers have testified before the International Criminal Court and are testifying under universal jurisdiction, i.e., war crimes. They witnessed orders to torture Ukrainian citizens in Russian prisons," Romanova said.
She emphasized that the testimony of these people is sometimes more important than UN reports, because they are people who know the Russian system from the inside.
According to Romanova, the fugitives themselves explain their decision to leave Russia by the fact that they originally went to the security agencies with the dream of changing the system from the inside. But with the outbreak of war against Ukraine, they had to put an end to these dreams.
"Basically, it is the horror of the fact that their country, Russia, is the aggressor, and they have to take part in this in one way or another. "Dismissing" someone at the front, torturing Ukrainians," the human rights activist says.