Kyrgyzstan deports Russian blogger accused of recruiting locals for Ukraine war

Russian pro-war blogger Viktor Vasilyev, who was tried in a Kyrgyzstani court for recruiting locals to fight in Moscow's war against Ukraine, has been deported from Kyrgyzstan and banned from the country for 10 years, he announced on his Telegram channel.

Vasilyev was arrested in April 2025 and later released from pre-trial detention on 12 June, according to the Telegram channel Mash. He reportedly planned to appeal the deportation order, though no verdict or sentence against him was publicly reported.

“They effectively forcibly deported me from Kyrgyzstan without allowing me to take care of the most urgent matters: filing a lawsuit against the outlet Azattyk and picking up my shoes from the repair shop,” Vasilyev wrote. “[This created] an atmosphere of fear and intimidation around me, just like in the good old horror films.”

Vasilyev has lived in Kyrgyzstan since 2020, when he enrolled in Bishkek's Kyrgyz Russian Slavic University. According to the independent outlet The Insider, he travelled to Africa in 2019 and began running Smiling and Waving, a Telegram channel in a network linked to the late Wagner mercenary group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin. The channel published fabricated and conspiratorial articles and remains active.

In 2011, a Russian court sentenced Vasilyev to eight years in prison for murdering a Black Sri Lankan man on the day of the far-right nationalist gathering Russian March. He was released on parole five years later.