The camera turns on. From a distance, in front of his computer, Dmitri Tchernichev appears, ruffling his hair with one hand. “My story is quite simplehe begins. When the war broke out [le 24 février], I spent all my time in front of my screen, I slept barely two or three hours. » A well-known blogger in Russia, this professional trainer has constantly denounced the invasion “monstrous” of Ukraine until, on March 4, the police arrived at his home. First alert. Then he was arrested in the middle of the street, in Moscow, near the Maïakovskaïa metro station, where he was spotted by the facial recognition system, ubiquitous in the capital. “The police handed me over to the FSB [les services russes de sécurité]. I told them that, for me, Putin had not been president since 2008, when he usurped power. I added: “I served two years in the paratroopers in Chernobyl, Ukraine, between 1984 and 1986, to protect a reactor, no need to scare me.” »
But the fear crept in. “They started by threatening my children, then, after three hours of interrogation, a woman with white hair arrived, who introduced herself as a general of the SVR [services des renseignements extérieurs]. She demanded that I put my loyalty to Putin in writing, a kind of oath. I refused. She then threatened to send me to DNR [république autoproclamée de Donetsk] and to attach myself to a post there as an informer in the pay of kyiv. I ended up writing a paper that I was stopping all activity on the Internet. » A few days later, on April 17, Dmitri Tchernichev flew with his wife and two children to Israel, where he now resides.
Like him, long before the rush to the borders caused by the announcement of Vladimir Putin, on September 21, of the “partial mobilization”, they are tens of thousands to have fled Russia since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. by the Kremlin. If the Russian data are partial and subject to caution, Rosstat, the National Institute of Statistics, evaluated, at the beginning of September, the departures over the first six months of the year at double those recorded during the same period in 2021 (419 085 exits against 202,562). According to other information from the FSB, which oversees border guards, all former Soviet republics, Armenia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan, saw a dramatic increase in entries from Russia in the first half of 2022 compared to 2019 – that is to say before the restrictions linked to Covid-19. Abkhazia alone, a territory which declared itself independent in Georgia after the lightning war of 2008 led by Russian forces, recorded 1.1 million admissions, 13% more than in the first half two years earlier.
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