A Tajik citizen married to a German gets denied asylum in Germany and is forced by immigration authorities to return to Tajikistan to apply for a family reunification visa. A few months after his return, he was abducted, tortured and killed by Tajik security services

freedomforeurasia.org/2729-2/

Sadly now closed!

Impressive investigation by @claramarchaud.bsky.social into the “great confiscation” Russia is carrying out in the occupied territories of Ukraine — a systematic campaign targeting some 25,000 homes belonging to Ukrainians who were displaced or killed during the war. www.lefigaro.fr/fig-data/ils...

The surveillance empire that tracked world leaders, a Vatican enemy, and maybe you www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

A stunning investigation by @lighthousereports.com of what I call "despotism as a service"👇

@nicoleeaton.bsky.social, Associate Professor of History at Boston College, teaches courses on the Soviet Union, Imperial Russia, modern Europe, authoritarianism, and mass violence. Check out her first book at the link below ⬇️
cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501767364/german-blood-slavic-soil/

It's not just about your personal safety (getting detained to be used as a bargaining chip is statistically not super probable), but about the safety of your friends, family, and even fleeting acquaintances.

Like, it's great you asked that Russian friend you met in Belgrade/Berlin for tips on what to see/do in Russia. But that friend might have a Ukrainian flag on their social media profile and the FSB can grab your phone, read your chats, and write down that person's information. It's not hypothetical

What bugs me more than the fact that Western tourists are still heading to Russia to "experience the Trans-Siberian" is that these visitors are putting their Russian friends and acquaintances both inside Russia and abroad potentially in danger.

Hearing more and more stories of Western tourists getting harassed by Russian border guards: lengthy interrogations, searching through phone chats and threatening with detention.
The foreigners are usually fine afterwards, but the FSB will use the info to harass and intimidate Russian contacts

Remember we're already in a world of Kavanaugh stops based solely on ethnicity. If you are from a targeted group, this can happen to you no matter what your citizenship status is. What if you forget your wallet at home? You could end up in detention for days or worse.

Reminder that only one of the world’s three truly grotesque genocidal slaughters came to a ceasefire this week, and the other two are getting worse

This is what I’ve heard from everyone who applied for citizenship here in Leipzig as well. Have two friends who have been waiting for their appointment for more than two years now.

This is very good.

"The French have very backward-looking IDs, but not as bad as the Italians or Greeks" was literally what the boss told the lady who was processing my documents and freaked out at the sight of my ID.

Takes a lot of nerve to talk about backwardness coming from a German lol

I am definitely blaming Leipzig on this one. Did not think my French ID card would elicit so much attention, commotion and confusion in the Bürgeramt. You'd think I had come from Mars!

Nobody I know, whether in Berlin or Leipzig, has ever been asked this. I lived in Germany between 2011 and 2016, moving around between places, never an issue. They also wanted to see proof of where I lived abroad during my 9 year absence from Germany, which is insane and irrelevant?

I was then told I will be moved from Steuerklasse 1 (for single people) to Steuerklasse 0 (for unbekannt). I just got home and checked––it's complete nonsense and there is no Steuerklasse 0. Very bewildering experience.

Still shocked at the level of incompetence I experienced. First, they wouldn't accept my French carte d'identité (nur Reisepass), then they told me there was a new Leipzig policy to check everyone's marriage status. They switched mine from "ledig" to "unbekannt". All during a simple Anmeldungstermin

This would be halfway understandable if I was actually in the process of getting married, but I'm just switching my official residency address.

German bureaucracy at its finest: just got told by the local residence registration office that I needed to get a document from Russia––a country I have never lived in since I left in 1991 when it was still the Soviet Union and I was a toddler––confirming that I am not currently married.

While traveling through Uzbekistan this summer, I became curious about the history of the Bukharan Jews and decided to examine how tourism is shaping what remains of the community, for my latest in @meduza.io's The Beet. meduza.io/en/feature/2...

I have a theory www.theverge.com/policy/79849...

PSA: being on welfare in Germany is absolutely awful as it is. You're under an insane amount of bureaucratic surveillance, the money you get is barely enough to survive on. A socialist dreamland it is not!

It's really tiring to see the "debate" around welfare in Germany at the moment, which is just a gross recycling of the racist "welfare queen" hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s in the US
www.deutschlandfunk.de/merz-bis-fru...