Twenty-six million people around the world have official refugee status, but only 487 of them live in Russia. Tens or even hundreds of thousands of people are engaged in the Russian government’s asylum application process at any given time, but it’s vanishingly rare for an application to be accepted. This is in part because Russia’s UN delegations often criticize human rights violations abroad, but the Russian government refuses to recognize armed conflicts and persecution as valid causes for granting asylum. Even of the 42,000 people who have temporary, one-year asylum status in Russia, all but 487 are from Ukraine.
Meduza: ‘Better this than war’
Refugees and migrants wait to be transfered from the island of Lesbos to the Greek main land on May 3, 2020. - On the Aegean island of Lesbos, more than 19,000 asylum seekers live in the overcrowded and unhealthy camp of Moria, the fear of a pandemic is even great. Some 100,000 asylum seekers are currently stranded in Greece after other European states closed their borders in 2016.
