STORY – A presidential election is taking place on Sunday in this former USSR country still closely linked to Russia.
Special Envoy to Astana and Almaty
In a restaurant in Almaty, Alexandre, 27, tells his story, similar to that of thousands of other young Russians who have arrived in the former capital of Kazakhstan since last September to flee the war in Ukraine. The day after the announcement of the mobilization, on September 21, this computer specialist in a Moscow company has already withdrawn to his parents’ home in Penza, 550 kilometers south-east of the capital. At 5:30 a.m., the police rang the doorbell to give him his mobilization sheet. “I did my service in the artillery, I was good at going to the front line”, he says. His mother claims she doesn’t know where he is.
He hides but decides to leave immediately for Kazakhstan, the former country of the USSR where his mother was born. To tell the truth, he had been thinking about it for a while: from 2012, he took to the streets to demonstrate on several occasions, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia became unbearable for him…
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