Still from a concert by the punk band Crispy Newspaper in 2020. Screenshot of YouTube video, from yunost severa YouTube channel. Fair use. Holod Magazine reported on the detention of an activist from Yakutia and published an interview with him. Global Voices translated the report and parts of the interview, and republished with permission from Holod. Aikhal Ammosov, a protestor against war and leader of the punk band Crispy Newspaper from Yakutia, Russia, was sent to a detention center on the October 10, 2023. in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where he has been waiting for four months to get a humanitarian visa and a foreigner’s passport to go to Germany. The inTransit initiative, a group that supports Russians facing political persecution, shared this information. The Republic of Sakha, or Yakutia, is Russia's largest republic, in the northeast along the Arctic Ocean. This vast region is home to a population of approximately one million people. In the 17th century, Russian colonizers incorporated the area into the Tsardom of Russia, naming it Yakutsk Oblast and colonizing the Indigenous peoples. Yakutia played a role in some of the final battles of the Russian Civil War. In 1922, the Bolshevik authorities reorganized Yakutsk Oblast into the autonomous Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR). Yakutia is endowed with natural resources, constituting a substantial share of the world's diamond production (25%). Despite this, Yakutia remains one of the most poor regions in the Russian Federation. Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began, activists have appeared in Yakutia who are both anti-war and talk about the decolonization of the republic. Ammosov didn’t have a passport, so he was stuck in Kazakhstan. He was planning to get a special type of German passport for foreigners after getting his visa, which would allow him to travel from Kazakhstan to Germany. InTransit said that they tried many times to speed up Ammosov’s move to another country because he was at high risk. But he didn’t get the documents he needed. Since 2023, it has been taking longer for people to get German humanitarian visas, according to German human rights groups, said inTransit. “This is a large-scale problem, and it affects all applicants for German humanitarian visas, regardless of their profession, risk factor, country, which they are located.” By August 2023, Germany had issued around 1,665 humanitarian visas to citizens of Russia since February 2022. DW wrote that an accelerated procedure for issuing humanitarian visas to Russians has been in effect in Germany since May 2022. They are issued on the basis of § 22 of the Residence Act (Aufenthaltsgesetz). “This applies to Russian citizens who are at particular risk because of their commitment to the fight against war, for democracy and human rights or because of actions critical of the regime,” the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) explained to DW. Stephen Phillips, researcher at the Institute for Human Rights at the Åbo Akademi commented to Global Voices: Humanitarian visa processing will vary a lot from country to country; there are no fixed international standards on how it should work in each place, nor are countries under any international obligations to even do it. Processing times can be linked to a lot of different factors, some of the more common ones that countries will refer to are the large numbers of applications they receive, some applications not having all the required documents, needing to perform background checks on the applicants (which can include waiting for responses from other agencies), and if a case is especially complex. Journalist Evgenia Baltatarova was the first to report that Ammosov was in detention. A representative of the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law said that Ammosov was sent to a pre-trial detention center for 40 days “in connection with the extradition issue.” The reason for the request was not specified. It is not yet clear what legal base will be used for his extradition. The “discrediting the army” offense, which Ammosov is charged with in Russia, is not on the list of extradition crimes, since there is no analogue for it in Kazakhstan's legislation. Since February 24, 2022, the poet, activist and leader of the Yakut punk band Crispy Newspaper Aikhal Ammosov (according to his passport — Igor Ivanov) regularly took to the streets with pickets and performances, painted graffiti and tried to hang anti-war banners in Russia. In August 2022 he was placed under administrative arrest.