Leaving Russia no longer necessarily means leaving Russian repression behind. According to a new report presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Russian Federation has developed a systematic and institutionalised system for surveilling, intimidating, coercing and punishing critics beyond its borders, extending the mechanisms of domestic repression into foreign jurisdictions.
“Transnational repression is not a series of isolated incidents abroad. It is the continuation, beyond Russia’s borders, of the same structural, State-sponsored system of repression I have documented at home,” said Mariana Katzarova, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Russian Federation. “Leaving Russia does not mean leaving Russian repression behind.”
Her report, “Nowhere is safe: exporting the rule of fear beyond borders – transnational repression by the Russian Federation”, draws on close to 400 documented cases and examines alleged abuses between 2004 and 2026. It concludes that transnational repression has become a systematic State strategy, closely connected to the consolidation of authoritarian rule inside Russia and the war of aggression against Ukraine.
The scale of the change became particularly pronounced after February 2022. Researchers estimate that between 650,000 and 900,000 people left Russia following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the announcement of a “partial mobilization” in September 2022. The exodus included anti-war activists, journalists, human rights defenders, advocates for Indigenous Peoples, lawyers, cultural figures and conscientious objectors, creating a large political diaspora outside the country.
The growth of that diaspora was accompanied by a sharp increase in documented cases of transnational repression. Civil-society data cited in the report shows an approximately eightfold increase in the average annual number of incidents when comparing 2014–2021 with 2022–2024. The number rose from 29 incidents over eight years to 89 over three. In absentia sentences increased from 4 in 2022 to 157 in 2025.
Katzarova argues that the defining change since 2022 is not simply the number of operations but the methods being used. The Russian authorities increasingly employ arrest warrants, international wanted lists, databases, financial restrictions, digital systems, legal proceedings and proxies, alongside direct physical attacks.
“Repression now travels through arrest warrants, databases, banks, digital systems, SLAPP and proxies,” Katzarova said. “The Russian Federation is the most frequent user of INTERPOL Red Notices, and roughly half of Russia-related cases reviewed by INTERPOL’s oversight body in 2024 were found non-compliant with its Constitution.”
The report identifies at least nine departments of the Federal Security Service as involved, alongside the military intelligence service, the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Investigative Committee, the Office of the Prosecutor-General, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and its directorate for combating extremism, the Ministry of Justice and Roskomnadzor.
The mechanisms extend well beyond the traditional image of an intelligence operation conducted overseas. Russian designations and legal restrictions can follow individuals through international financial and compliance systems. Rosfinmonitoring registers 21,541 individuals as “terrorists and extremists”, including at least 5,063 prosecuted on politically motivated charges. The report says such data propagates automatically and unvetted through global compliance databases such as LSEG World-Check and LexisNexis, while banks can block victims’ accounts without evidence. In June 2026, OVD-Info, whose monitoring underpins international reporting on Russian repression, was itself added to the register.
A Federal Law enacted in August 2026 introduced 14 categories of restrictions on listed nationals abroad, ranging from frozen assets to withdrawn passports. Katzarova described the consequences in stark terms: “They keep the duties of citizenship while losing most of its content. This is civic death.”
Yet the report makes clear that the new bureaucratic and digital methods have not replaced violence. They operate alongside a long record of targeted attacks. The report identifies assassinations, attempted killings, assaults and suspected poisonings as the most serious, although comparatively rare, forms of transnational repression.
Among the cases cited are Alexander Litvinenko, killed with polonium-210 in London in 2006; the attempted assassination of Sergei and Yulia Skripal using a military-grade nerve agent in Salisbury in 2018; and the killing of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin in 2019. In February 2024, Maxim Kuzminov, a Russian military pilot who had defected to Ukraine, was murdered in Spain in what Spanish authorities assessed as a targeted assassination.
Other cases remain less conclusively attributed. Elena Kostyuchenko, a Novaya Gazeta journalist, fell ill with symptoms of poisoning after travelling to Munich in October 2022, while former Echo of Moscow journalist Irina Babloyan was similarly targeted a week later in Tbilisi. Natalia Arno, a Buryat human rights defender and President of the Free Russia Foundation, reported suspected poisonings during trips to Czechia and Germany in 2023. The report notes that no definitive causes have been publicly established in those cases and that attribution remains pending investigation.
The consequences can become particularly severe when foreign legal and law-enforcement systems are used to return people to Russia. The report warns that extradition, deportation, expulsion, rendition or abduction can place targets back in the hands of the authorities from whom they sought protection.
The case of Mansur Movlayev illustrates the danger described by the Special Rapporteur. A vocal critic of the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, Movlayev fled Russia after previously being abducted, arbitrarily detained and tortured by Chechen security forces. He was detained in Kazakhstan in May 2025 following a Russian extradition request related to extortion charges, which he denies. After nearly 18 months in detention and repeated asylum rejections, the report says he remains at risk of torture or death if returned.
Katzarova argues that such cases expose weaknesses in international cooperation mechanisms. Host States, she says, have obligations to scrutinise Russian requests, respect non-refoulement and ensure that international policing and financial systems are not used automatically to reproduce politically motivated Russian designations abroad.
“There is nothing inevitable about transnational repression,” Katzarova said. “Where host States meet their obligations — respecting non-refoulement, scrutinising Russian INTERPOL notices and wanted-list entries, and requiring banks to verify Russian designations — transnational repression fails.”
The report also highlights the broader reach of Russia’s domestic repression. By mid-2026, more than 1,200 individuals and organisations had been designated as “foreign agents”, while more than 380 organisations had been designated “undesirable”. The report argues that these frameworks, together with “war censorship” laws and digitalised conscription systems, increasingly affect Russians outside the country.
For Katzarova, the problem is no longer adequately addressed through individual cases alone. She argues that transnational repression represents a challenge to human rights, host-State sovereignty and the international legal order, while also threatening the ability of exiled communities to engage with foreign governments and international institutions.
The report therefore calls for the development of a binding United Nations convention addressing transnational repression. Such an instrument, it says, should establish common definitions, host-State duties and frameworks for prevention, accountability and inter-State cooperation.
The central issue identified by the Special Rapporteur is the absence of a common international framework capable of addressing a system that does not stop at a border. Russia’s methods, according to the report, range from assassination and intimidation to extradition requests, international databases, financial restrictions and digital surveillance. The challenge for the international system is how to prevent those mechanisms from turning foreign territory into an extension of domestic repression.
