Sergei Anisiforov’s battle for asylum in Ukraine has ended in victory three years after he was injured on Maidan and even honoured for his part in Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity. In a hearing on February 22, the Odesa District Court of Appeal addressed blistering criticism at the Odesa branch of Ukraine’s Migration Service and gave it until the end of March to provide Anisiforov with refugee status

Ukraine’s Security Service [SBU] appears to be collaborating with its Russian FSB counterpart even where there are strong grounds for believing that FSB interest in Russian citizens living in Ukraine is as politically motivated as its persecution of Ukrainians in occupied Crimea and Russia

Sergei Anisiforov has just had the latest application for asylum rejected by the Ukrainian Migration Service despite different courts agreeing that the Russian would be in danger if forced to return. Ukraine’s Migration Service, most incredibly, appears to still be collaborating with the Russian authorities.

Ukraine’s Security Service [SBU] have illegally seized a 26-year-old woman who had just applied for asylum in Kharkiv and forcibly taken her to Russia in a move which human rights activists have called treachery and which suggests a baffling degree of collaboration between Russia and Ukraine’s security services

Roman Roslovtsev, the courageous Moscow activist challenging Russia’s draconian anti-protest legislation has had enough, and is planning to apply for political asylum in Ukraine.

Vladimir Ionov has been granted political asylum in Ukraine, eight months after he was forced to flee likely imprisonment for peaceful protest in Russia under the draconian new anti-protest laws

While Ukraine’s leaders actively protest against Russia’s political trials of Ukrainians, politically motivated charges against Russian nationals are cited as reasons for rejecting asylum requests

Sergei Anisiforov, 45, gave up a successful career as a TV and film actor in Russia to participate in Ukraine’s Maidan. Now he is part of the Odessa Maidan self-defence forces, but he is also battling the Ukrainian Migration Service for the right to remain in the country legally

Russian civic activist Irina Kalmykova has been forced to flee Russia where she was facing the same charges over totally peaceful protest that resulted in a three-year prison sentence for Ildar Dadin. Like 76-year-old Vladimir Ionov, Iryna and her 14-year-old son have come to Ukraine, and are clearly in need of asylum.

Amid a deepening Kremlin crackdown on dissent, more than 200 Russians who have fallen afoul of the authorities in their country have fled to Ukraine since the beginning of 2014, according to the Ukrainian State Migration Service.

Incredibly, given the ongoing imprisonment of Nadiya Savchenko, Oleg Sentsov, Oleksandr Kolchenko and other Ukrainians, as well as long sentences passed on Russians for peaceful protest, Ukraine’s migration service is still claiming that Russia is a democratic country to which activists can be returned.

There is strong evidence that the draconian sentence against Ildar Dadin was in part because of his support for Ukraine, while Rafis Kashapov is serving a 3-year sentence for opposing Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The list of those facing persecution in Russia for a pro-Ukrainian stand is rapidly increasing, and there can be no excuse for Ukraine’s authorities to send activists back.

Hundreds of Ukrainians who fled to Russia from the fighting at home in eastern Ukraine could soon be out on the streets after Moscow in November adopted tougher new rules for the refugees.

In yet another blow to the huge number of Ukrainians forced to flee their homes in Crimea and Donbas, President Petro Poroshenko has vetoed a law lobbied by groups working with displaced people and human rights NGOs

(Updated) In a vital, but belated victory, Crimean Yakiv Vityuk has won the right to vote in Ukraine’s local elections on Sunday. Up to one and a half million Ukrainians, forced from their homes in Crimea or Donbas, have, however, been denied this constitutionally guaranteed right.. 

Ukrainian human rights organizations have addressed an appeal to the country’s legislators to enable swift passage of a bill urgently needed to help people forced from their homes by Russia’s invasion of Crimea and military conflict in Donbas.

Human rights activists have criticized a resolution passed by Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers on March 4 as unconstitutional and discriminatory, and say that it likens internally displaced people [IDP] from Crimea and Donbas to criminals.

Ilya Lukash, a Kyrgyz national of Ukrainian descent, who organized pro-EuroMaidan demonstrations in Kyrgystan and fled persecution to Ukraine at the beginning of March 2014 has been refused asylum.

Before feeling pride that a Russian opposition blogger facing persecution at home has sought refuge in Ukraine, note that Ukrainian border guards initially tried to stop Dmitry Shipilov entering the country even after he lodged an application for asylum

Pavel Shekhtman, the Russian political activist who fled to Ukraine in recent days, has been added to Russia’s ‘register of terrorists and extremists’. The list includes Oleg Sentsov, but not Russian fascist ideologue Alexander Dugin whose call to “kill all Ukrainians” was more public and no less extreme than the Facebook comment made by Shekhtman.