Even as Central Asia’s leaders head to Moscow to participate in the May 9 Victory Day celebrations, media surfaced recent video of Moscow police once again raiding a cafe frequented and staffed by Central Asians.
In a May 8 report, RFE/RL’s Central Asian Migrants’ Unit shared a video obtained from a Moscow cafe where staff and customers claim they were beaten by police during an April 25 raid. The surveillance video shows black-clad men, officers with the Russian special forces unit (SOBR), storming the cafe’s dining room and throwing customers to the ground.
In the video, an officer kicks a man on his knees, apparently thinking the man was too slow to lie down. “I said get down, bitch,” the officer shouts.
An officer then smashes the cafe’s surveillance camera with his baton.
RFE/RL reported that witness claim this was the third raid on the cafe in a month. As in past instances, staff and customers were badly beaten.
This latest report follows several incidents of Russian security forces conducting violent raids on places where Central Asians gather, such as cafes and bath houses. Earlier in April, a video circulated on social media showing Kyrgyz migrants being forced, by black-clad Moscow police, to crawl over each other on the floor of a bathhouse.
A Kyrgyz man detained during the raid on the Bodrost bathhouse complex told RFE/RL, “Some people were challenged to arm-wrestling matches, and those who lost were beaten.”
He went on: “Some had their documents torn up. People were forced to jump into a pool while fully clothed. Others had money taken from their pockets. One person was forced to eat half a kilo of hot peppers.” The beatings lasted five hours, he said.
“We didn’t understand why they were beating us. One man stood up and asked why. They answered: ‘We just don’t like you,’” he said.
In March, Human Rights Watch released a 63-page report, titled “Living in Fear and Humiliation: Rising Xenophobic Harassment and Violence towards Central Asian Migrants in Russia,” which documented the ways in which Central Asian migrants have experienced ethnic profiling, arbitrary arrests, and harassment by both police and far-right nationalist civilian groups. Although pressure on Central Asian migrants in Russia is not new, and neither is xenophobia, since the March 2024 Crocus City Hall attack, “Russian officials doubled down, fanning the fire of racist and anti-migrant public sentiments.”
Human Rights Watch wrote to the foreign and labor ministries of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan for comment, receiving a response only from Kyrgyz authorities in November 2024. The Kyrgyz Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Human Rights Watch reported, “said there had been intense communication with their Russian counterparts on protecting the rights of Kyrgyzstani migrants in Russia, and ensuring that employment restrictions developed as part of the more securitized migration policy in Russia would not affect Kyrgyz citizens due to Kyrgyzstan’s membership in the Eurasian Economic Union.”
In February 2025, Deputy Kyrgyz Minister of Foreign Affairs Almaz Imangaziev issued a note of protest to Russia’s ambassador in Kyrgyzstan, Sergey Vakunov, in relation to new migration rules rolled out by Moscow that could affect the movement of Kyrgyz workers and their families to and from Russia.
After the April bath house raid, the Kyrgyz Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned Vakunov to request clarification about the operation and the force deployed but did not issue a formal diplomatic protest. As reported by RFE/RL, when Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Jeenbek Kulubayev was questioned in parliament over the “sluggish” response to the incident, he replied, “We must resolve all issues through negotiations… We cannot issue a demarche tomorrow. If we do, then in three days, all machinery here will come to a halt. Gas and oil will be cut off. They will load hundreds of thousands of our citizens onto trains and deport them.”
Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov will attend the Victory Day celebrations in Moscow alongside leaders from more than two dozen countries, including China and all of Central Asia. Japarov will not, it seems, meet directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Kyrgyz president’s press secretary told Russian media that there were no bilateral meetings planned.
While the region’s leaders sit beside Putin and watch a military parade on Red Square that takes place even as Russia wages war against Ukraine, Central Asians working in Russia – numbering in the millions and remitting millions back to their home countries – will be wondering where the heavy boots of the Russian state will stomp next.