Dissident Russians Try to Settle in Bulgaria, But Struggle to Get Asylum

Konstantin Semenov is a founder of a company selling video games and leads a life that pretty much looks like a game in which someone is being pinged from place to place: he’s a self-exiled Russian who has lived in various countries in recent years, but is now is trying to secure asylum in Bulgaria.  Currently, Semenov is based in the coastal city of Varna, already home to sizable Russian and Ukrainian diasporas. Here he has initiated protests under the banner of the For a Free Russia organisation, in which he participates along with several other like-minded Russians.  But so far his efforts to obtain asylum status on humanitarian grounds have been rejected by Bulgaria’s State Agency for Refugees, which has denied many other Russians seeking shelter from the Kremlin regime. Semenov was born in 1985 in Novosibirsk in Siberia, then lived in Novorossiysk near the Black Sea and Krasnoyarsk, also in Siberia. In 2012, he attended an anti-government protest in Krasnoyarsk during which he was arrested and subjected to what he describes as "psychological and physical violence”. He legally left Russia with his wife Anna in 2013 and departed for Phuket, Thailand. By 2015, the couple were based in Miami and in 2016, Los Angeles, with the ambition to receive humanitarian status in the US, due to the worsening political situation in Russia. Slow and unsure procedures as well as rising costs of living made them return to Europe and settle in Kyiv, Ukraine – the reason being that his wife has a Ukrainian grandfather and this could be the basis of obtaining a citizenship or protection – which did not happen.  Since 2013, Semenov says he has made financial donations to a military unit in Kolomiya, Ukraine.  Between 2018 and 2020 the family, now with two children, returned to Phuket, and after fears that they might be extradited to Russia, went back to Ukraine.  Then, in January 2020, Semenov was arrested in Kyiv after he was flagged by an Interpol notice for an alleged drug possession charge logged by Russia – a crime he claims he never committed because he was not in Russia at the time of the alleged office in 2019. Semenov was freed after two months in prison and successfully appealed against his extradition to Russia, and in 2022, he was taken off the Interpol database. The charges were deemed wrongful, while his lawyer described the case as being “fabricated” by Russian authorities. Right after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the family went to live in the towns of Vinitza and Kamianets-Podilskyi in the Western part of Ukraine. Staying in Ukraine proved harder over time because the country imposed legal measures to restrict or block bank accounts of Russian citizens and also cancelled their temporary residency permits.  The family felt uneasy to be associated with the invading country. “The worsening situation around the war was the main reason to leave Ukraine. There were electricity cuts and airstrikes, not the best situation to raise your children aged seven and 11,” Simenov said. The family went to Varna in the summer of 2023. Bulgaria was the only EU country from the several they applied to that issued them a visa. A country like Serbia, where many Russians headed, was not an option: “We’re not looking for a country outside of the EU as those are usually more friendly to Russia and this holds further risks,” said Semenov. “If I receive asylum, I plan to stay in Varna. Here there is a similar culture and language, good climate, and it’s financially viable.”  Semenov provided BIRN with Bulgaria’s rejection note for his asylum application from March this year, as well as various documents around his donations and appeals. The refusal note contains several pages about Russian espionage activities in Europe. Much of the information quoting the UK’s Guardian newspaper and how spy rings are established, without an obvious reason how this was relevant to Semenov’s background.  He clarified to BIRN that the article was unrelated to his story and says he was never questioned about being a potential security threat. The State Agency for Refugees did not reply to BIRN’s questions about whether Russian citizens are increasingly seen as spies or whether there’s any evidence for this. Earlier this year, BIRN was contacted by another Russian citizen seeking asylum in Bulgaria, 22-year-old Parakhin Grigoriy Alexeevich, born in Novokuznetsk.  He said he had been involved in protests in Russia from as early as 2016, when he attended a rally led by opposition leader and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny aged just 13. But Bulgaria’s State Agency for Refugees rejected his asylum application, citing a doubt that he could develop a political leaning at such an early age.  Alexeevich, who provided to BIRN his rejection note and testimony to court, also confirmed that he was involved in demonstrations from an early age. “Navalny inspired me to engage in protest activities and my mother is a politically conscious person too, she organised a protest in my hometown against the government in 1991,” he said.  Alexeevich says he was arrested during another protest in Russia in November 2017 and that he has been under surveillance from the Russian authorities ever since, including the Federal Security Service. He also attended protests in 2021 in support of Navalny, where he says he was being monitored. “In the winter of 2021, a week before the start of the rally in support of Alexei Navalny, literally every day, employees of the Center for Combating Extremism came to the school and people’s homes, handing out warnings not to engage,” he said.  After Russia’sfull-scale invasion of Ukraine, during an anti-war protest in March 2022, he was arrested by the police in front of his home, as he was heading towards the demonstration. He was then questioned for three hours and threatened he would be sent to serve in the military.  Before arriving in Bulgaria, Parakhin had started his migrant journey from Ekaterinburg. He said  there were not many flights out of the airport at the time so he flew to Kazakhstan, where he was questioned by police about whether he planned any protest activity, before being allowed to go.  After Kazakhstan, he got a visa in Northern Cyprus. Then he moved to Tbilisi in Georgia for a year, where he attended more anti-Putin demonstrations.  He arrived in Bulgaria in 2023, where he was again part of anti-Putin rallies. During this time, he says that he made donations to the ‘Freedom of Russia Legion’. He has offered recordings of his protest attendance and media appearances to the Bulgarian authorities, as well as a letter from Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation from 2025, which recognises his activity as a volunteer in his hometown. Online, he uses the pseudonym Abdurakhman Rodzaevsky, which he explains “sounds strong, beautiful” and emphasises his Muslim background.  His asylum request has been rejected twice, in 2023 and 2025. The rejections say Alexeevich is offering “unconvincing evidence” with sources not translated into Bulgarian. Officials told him his affiliation to different anti-Putin organisations pose a threat to his life.  They said his 2017 arrest happened too long ago “to have an effect on his current case”.  Parakhin said he plans to leave for Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he expects that he will obtain asylum status easily.  As BIRN reported in May, another of the Russian citizens unable to obtain asylum status in Bulgaria is Ksenia Eliseeva. She took part in protests in Rostov-on-Don and was close to Alexei Navalny’s opposition movement. Sensing war was imminent, she left Russia in 2021 for Poland, before settling in Bulgaria in October 2022, where she has also taken part in protests. Since BIRN spoke to her earlier this year, Eliseeva applied for asylum in Bulgaria for a second time, this time with an emphasis on the worsening political climate in Russia. But in July she received another refusal.  In a document she provided, it’s said that the political situation in Russia is not worse than it was when she applied the first time, and there are no new factors that would put her in danger on return.  Eliseeva told BIRN she will appeal against the decision in court at the end of October.  Another thing that connects the cases of Semenov, Alexeevich and Eliseeva is that the rejection notes often make the point that since the applicants left their countries legally and of their own free will, there shouldn’t be an issue with them coming back.  BIRN contacted the State Agency for Refugees for comment but did not receive an answer by the time of publication.  The For a Free Russia organisation, of which Semenov is a member, plans to stage actions in November to raise the issue of the asylum rejections that opposition-minded Russians are facing in Bulgaria.