Roman Golikov fled Putin’s army mobilisation and supported Navalny. Finland still denied him asylum

While in Russia, Golikov donated to the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK in Russian), the organisation founded by the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, between 2021 and 2022. He continued to do so even after the Russian authorities outlawed the group as an “extremist community”. Golikov had also served as an election monitor in Moscow and taken part in opposition rallies. His details appear in the “Himera” leak aggregator, a database compiling information on opposition supporters from leaked official Russian sources.

He entered Finland on a tourist visa just a week before Russia’s mobilisation drive was announced in September 2022. When the call-up began, he decided to remain in the country and seek asylum. Golikov told Mediazona that a summons was delivered to his home in Russia within the first few days of the mobilisation. He completed his national service in 2012 but has no other military experience.

The Finnish migration service spent nearly three years processing his application, during which he was interviewed six times. While awaiting a decision, Golikov actively participated in anti-war protests held in Finland.

On April 14, his application was rejected. According to documents reviewed by Mediazona, Finnish officials acknowledged that Golikov had consistently engaged in opposition activities and had received a mobilisation summons. However, they concluded there were insufficient grounds to grant him asylum, deeming the risk he would face upon returning to Russia unproven. The rejection letter stressed that Golikov had never been penalised for his political views while in Russia and argued that since the mobilisation had officially ended in November 2022, he was no longer at risk of being conscripted.

In his interviews, Golikov said he feared persecution if he were to be returned to Russia, where he believes he could be detained, imprisoned, tortured, or coerced into signing a military contract. The activist told Mediazona he has been struggling with suicidal thoughts and is taking prescribed antidepressants. “For me, [suicide is] no more terrifying than ending up in a Russian prison,” he said. “But I still have the time and strength to fight”.

The state-appointed lawyer now representing Golikov said the refusal was unexpected. “I could not believe that [the decision on] his petition would be negative,” she told Mediazona, describing his application as “exceptionally strong”.

She said she could find no clear justification for the denial in the official decision. “I can’t [point to anything] that he failed to prove,” she explained. “Sometimes it’s easy to say why a decision is negative: there is a certain reason, or a contradiction, or there is no evidence. But in his case, he has evidence about everything, and it was still denied”.

The lawyer added that Golikov’s initial legal help was insufficient. “He did not have a proper lawyer,” she said. “The legal representation was not very good because the lawyer never showed up in the interviews, for example”.

Golikov’s Russian foreign passport expired in October 2024, and his status as an asylum seeker prevents him from applying for a new one at the Russian embassy. If his appeal fails, he expects he will be “sent to the border with some piece of paper instead of a passport,” a situation that will inevitably attract the scrutiny of Russia’s federal security service, the FSB.

According to Vot Tak, a news outlet, Finland’s National Police have deported 104 Russian citizens who were denied asylum since the start of the year. Eighteen who refused to leave voluntarily were removed under guard. Another activist seeking asylum, Maxim Aliev, told the outlet that those being forcibly deported are typically put on a flight to Turkey or taken overland through Estonia to the Narva border crossing, the main land route between the E.U. and Russia.