Paul Goble
Staunton, March 27 – More than 23,000 citizens of the Russian Federation, a large percentage of them non-Russians from the North Caucasus, sought political asylum in Europe in 2012, a number that ranks Russia just behind Afghanistan and Syria and ahead of Iraq, Somalia and China, according to Eurostat, the European Statistics Bureau.
In a report about this on the Word Without Borders portal yesterday, Yekaterina Trofimova reported that 332,000 people requested asylum in EU countries last year, of whom 26,250 were from Afghanistan, 23,510 from Syria, and 23,360 from the Russian Federation (wordyou.ru/v-rossii/beg-iz-ussr.html).
Svetlana Gannushkina, a Moscow human rights activist, said that it was entirely "logical” that Russia was now in third place: "After the Chechen war, Russia was in first place in terms of the number of political refugees; during the war in Afghanistan, ...
