In the past five years, hundreds of Jehovah’s Witnesses have been rounded up, arrested, and prosecuted in Russia. Many others have fled, including a couple, Dmitrii and Nellia Antsybor, who flew to Mexico last year, crossed the US border on foot to seek asylum, and now hope to build a new life in Washington state.
After entering the United States and spending almost three months apart in two immigration detention centers; Nellia welcomes her newfound freedom in Federal Way, a suburb of Seattle, even though she misses her twin sister and her mother, who are in Russia.
But now there is a new source of concern: the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“I am very worried about what is happening to my brothers and sisters in that country,” Dmitrii said. “We pray for them.”
Some 5,000 Witnesses have left Ukraine for safety, said Jarrod Lopes, a spokesman for Jehovah’s Witnesses in the United States.
For Russian Jehovah’s Witnesses — Lopes estimates there are about 170,000 — there has been anxiety since the Russian Supreme Court declared the Christian denomination an extremist group in 2017.
Hundreds have been arrested and jailed. Their homes and places of worship, known as Kingdom Halls, have been raided and the national headquarters have been seized. The modern Russian translation of the Bible is banned along with its worldwide Awake and Watchtower magazines.
Nellia said that she and Dmitrii were on the radar of the authorities in the cities where they lived for a long time. They decided to run away, Nellia said, after her mother called in October and said police had a warrant for her arrest.
“To be a Jehovah’s Witness in Russia is to be constantly in legal jeopardy, in constant fear of invasion of privacy, confiscation of property, or in many cases being locked up,” said Jason Morton, policy analyst for the US Commission. for International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan federal agency that tracks violations of religious freedom around the world.
Last year 105 Jehovah’s Witnesses were found guilty by courts in Russia, according to the commission. The maximum sentences have been increased from six to eight years.
The Russian government has never given a detailed justification for the crackdown.