In October, Russian lawmaker Sergei Mironov stirred anger in Uzbekistan after calling for visa restrictions on millions of Uzbeks who travel to Russia every year in search of work.
The reason for his threat?
Uzbekistan’s consulate in the Russian city of Kazan had just issued a notice, warning citizens against participation in foreign wars and reminding them that breaking this Uzbek law could lead to jail sentences of up to 10 years.
Mironov’s words triggered counterreactions from at least two Uzbek lawmakers and plenty of noise from social media users tired of what they see as Russian politicians’ interference and intimidation.
But the recent rulings by Uzbek courts suggest that citizens sentenced in their homeland for fighting on Russia’s side in its full-scale war on Ukraine can be hopeful of much less than a 10-year sentence.
And, after Uzbekistan’s neighbor Kyrgyzstan appeared to cave under Moscow’s pressure regarding a jailed Russian military recruit last year, the legal disincentives that might push citizens of both countries to ignore the Kremlin’s manpower drive suddenly look much weaker than they did at the start of the nearly three-year war.
Kyrgyz Precedents
There is no reliable data on the number of nationals from Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan fighting for Russia in Ukraine.
But evidence points to many more of them fighting for Moscow than for Kyiv.
Meanwhile, nationals of the last three countries have been specifically targeted by the Kremlin’s recruitment drive owing to their massive presence on the Russian labor market.
And that has left Russia’s partners in the region in an awkward position as they try to deter their citizens from accepting promises of fast-tracked Russian citizenship and other material benefits to join a war that none of them have publicly endorsed.
In May 2023, Kyrgyz citizen Askar Kubanychbek-uulu was handed a 10-year sentence by a court in his homeland after enlisting in the Russian Army.
Kyrgyzstan’s law prohibiting participation in foreign wars allows for prison sentences of up to 15 years.
Russian officials did not hide their displeasure.
That summer, a member of Russia's Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights, Kirill Kabanov, said Moscow should "use all possible mechanisms of pressure as a response to [what are] clearly unfriendly actions on the part of Kyrgyz authorities," if Bishkek did not free him.
In January last year, Kubanychbek-uulu was released from jail and his prison term was reduced to a conditional sentence of seven years in the event of any violations during a three-year probation period.
But probation was never enforced.
Kyrgyz probation officers claimed not to have received the paperwork from the Supreme Court and, by the end of April, Kubanychbek-uulu had traveled to Russia to sign a fresh military contract and receive his new Russian passport.
In an August interview with the Kremlin-funded RT television network, Kubanychbek–uulu thanked RT and other Russian media for covering his plight and promised to “go and defend the homeland -- the interests of Russia.”
Under a presidential amnesty in July, Kyrgyzstan released another citizen -- Beknazar Borugul-uulu -- who had been jailed for fighting for Russia. Borugul-uulu, a former inmate in a Russian jail, had been recruited by the Wagner Group.
He spent less than a year in prison.
Like A 'Sales Campaign'
While the Kyrgyz cases have played out in public, the names of Uzbek citizens sentenced over their participation in the war are not known.
Nor is it clear what role, if any, Russian pressure played in the process.
But local media have reported on the details of the cases, as released by the various Uzbek courts that tried the individuals.
Last year, a court in the southeastern province of Qashqadaryo sentenced a local man to six years in a penal colony in connection with his fighting for Russia in the Ukraine war.
The court heard that the defendant was at the front for only a few days before he was injured by a drone explosion and allowed to recuperate in a hospital in Russia. He later returned to Uzbekistan, where he confessed to his crime.
This month, that six-year incarceration was turned into a six-year conditional sentence by the judge of an appeals court.
In their appeal, the defendant’s lawyers cited his cancer diagnosis -- not something that would always get a convict off the hook in Uzbekistan’s punitive legal system.
In the second half of last year, according to monitoring by RFE/RL’s Uzbek Service, at least four other Uzbek citizens received noncustodial sentences for fighting for Russia in Ukraine.
One of the men, tried by a court in the city of Andijon, admitted during the proceedings that he had killed “more than 10 Ukrainian soldiers” while at the front.
In his defense, he said he had been motivated by a promised salary of around $4,500 -- more than three times what he eventually received -- and that he was the only breadwinner in his family of three children.
He received a noncustodial sentence of four years and two months.
These lenient punishments have not gone unnoticed in Ukraine.
Hryhoriy Pyrlyk, a journalist and author of the Ukraine-Central Asia Telegram channel who has also written for RFE/RL, said that the Uzbek judge in that case “put the children of the convict above the children of Ukrainians.”
To date, Russia’s war has left 13,000 Ukrainian children without one parent and more than a thousand orphaned, Pyrlyk said.
Uzbek journalist Mukhrrim Azamkhojaev was also unimpressed.
“This looks like a sales campaign that says: 'Join the Russian Army, fight against Ukraine, and live happily in Uzbekistan on the money you earn,’” he said.
