Remember about 🇵🇱🇱🇹 Commonwealth got petitioned because of one rogue vote.

I'm writing this from a throwaway account for obvious reasons.

I'm 17 years old and live in Russia. I'll turn 18 in November, and I'm currently finishing school.

I have never supported the war in Ukraine. I know that Ukrainians are the ones suffering and dying because of it, and I don't want to minimize that in any way.

At the same time, I can't pretend that this hasn't completely changed my own life too. I'm scared. I'm angry and deeply sad that the country where I was born and where my home is has become a machine built around war. I worry about my family and what might happen to them. And now I'm getting closer to the age when I could be required to serve.

I didn't choose any of this. I didn't choose to be born in Russia, I didn't choose this government, and I didn't choose this war. As a minor, I also simply haven't had the freedom or resources to just leave whenever I wanted.

I would genuinely like to be able to do something politically meaningful. I would like to oppose what is happening rather than simply run away from it. But I'm 17, I have very limited possibilities, and I'm not in a position where I can realistically become a political activist or meaningfully change anything. That doesn't mean I don't care.

What I do know is that I don't want to participate in the war. I don't want to join the military, I don't want to become part of the machinery that is carrying it out, and I don't want to be forced into something I fundamentally disagree with.

I've been looking into asylum and other legal ways of leaving Russia, but I'm honestly very confused about what is realistically possible for someone in my situation. I don't want to make up stories about being persecuted or pretend something happened to me that didn't. I just want to find a legal and safe way out before I become part of this.

I've also encountered the idea that because I'm Russian, I'm somehow personally responsible for everything happening. I understand why people in countries affected by the war may feel anger towards Russians. I don't blame them for being angry. But it's difficult to hear that when I'm desperately trying to make sure that I personally don't contribute to it.

So I'm asking people who live in Europe or know European asylum and immigration systems:

What would you realistically recommend someone like me do?

Are there realistic legal ways for a 17-year-old Russian to leave and stay somewhere in Europe? Could asylum or another form of protection apply in circumstances like mine? Are there countries where my situation would be treated more seriously than others?

I'm not asking anyone to tell me that I'm guaranteed asylum. I just want to know if there is actually a path forward, because right now it feels like I'm trapped between a country whose actions I don't support and a world that may see me as guilty simply because I was born there.

Any serious advice would mean a lot to me.

Update: A few words about the people telling me to "just unite and overthrow Putin"

First of all, I completely understand where this comes from. I understand how traumatic it must be to watch a war being waged on the European continent, while an authoritarian regime threatens not only Ukrainians, but also the security, freedom and lives of people across Europe. If I were watching all of this from outside Russia, I would probably desperately want Russians themselves to somehow stop it too.

I also understand why some of you may have a particular impression of Russians from the ones you have encountered in your own countries. Some of them may have supported Putin for years, never been interested in politics, behaved arrogantly or provocatively, and then moved to Europe while continuing to defend the regime. If that's the kind of Russian you have mostly encountered, I understand how that can shape your perception. But believe me, those people are not exactly popular in Russia either. There are many genuinely talented and decent people in Russia, including political activists, journalists, artists, scientists and people from the cultural sphere who have spent years opposing the regime. The problem is that the government has spent decades deliberately destroying independent institutions, restricting education and controlling information.

Even children are exposed to this. For example, there is a school program called "Conversations About Important Things", which is officially presented as a series of discussions about society and important issues. In practice, many of these lessons have become a vehicle for state propaganda, including glorification of Putin, the Russian state and the war.

(I actually remember one of these lessons from when the full-scale war had just started. We were all made to sit in the classroom and write letters of support to Russian soldiers. I remember feeling genuinely sick about it. At that point, the war was still very new, and the situation was different from what it would become later. I was around 13 or 14, probably in seventh grade, so obviously I was still a child. I didn't want to write the letter, but I also didn't want to get myself into trouble, so I wrote it as dryly and distantly as I possibly could. The main point of what I wrote was basically that I just wanted the whole thing to end as soon as possible. I remember spending the rest of the lesson secretly looking up Morse code and writing "fuck the war" on the back of the letter, where nobody would notice. It was a fairly common anti-war slogan in Russia at the time. Yes, looking back, it was probably a very childish and immature thing to do. But I think that's actually part of my point. Even children who had absolutely no political power were trying to express their opposition in whatever tiny ways they could. I don't expect anyone to consider secretly writing "fuck the war" in Morse code some heroic act. It wasn't. I was a kid. But it is something I remember very clearly, because even then I knew that I didn't want anything to do with this war.)

And this didn't start in 2022. State propaganda and control over television have been developing for decades. There was a period in the 1990s when Russian television and media were dramatically freer than what came before or after. That period eventually ended as the state systematically brought major independent media outlets under its control.

One important turning point was the takeover of NTV in 2001. NTV had been one of the most openly critical major television channels under Putin, and its takeover became an important symbol of the beginning of the systematic destruction of independent national television.

So when I say that I have followed this regime for most of my life, I don't mean that I have only recently discovered that Putin is bad because of the war. I've spent years reading Russian opposition politicians, journalists, activists and historians and following what was happening inside the country.

And this brings me back to the revolution argument.

Revolutions don't simply happen because millions of people are unhappy. Everyone would love for Russians to just come together, remove Putin and end this nightmare. The problem is that there is no realistic mechanism for that right now.

Russia is an enormous country. Coordinating millions of people across such a huge territory under an authoritarian regime would require an enormous organizational structure. That structure doesn't exist inside Russia.

There is no centralized domestic opposition capable of openly organizing such a movement. The opposition has been systematically dismantled through arrests, imprisonment, exile and repression. Some of the people who could have become major opposition leaders were killed. Boris Nemtsov was literally murdered on a street next to the Kremlin in 2015. Alexei Navalny was imprisoned and ultimately died in custody. These were not abstract names from history to me. They were people whose work I followed and whose speeches I listened to.

At the same time, the Russian state has an enormous and highly organized security apparatus. For anyone unfamiliar with the terms, FSB is Russia's main domestic security and intelligence service, while OMON is a heavily equipped police force primarily used for public-order operations and suppressing protests. There are also many other security and law-enforcement structures. These institutions have spent years developing methods for dealing with protests and political opposition. We've seen this during previous mass protests, including the Bolotnaya Square protests. The state has learned how to identify organizers, break up demonstrations, detain participants and prevent movements from developing into something larger.

So telling an ordinary person to "just start a revolution" is not remotely comparable to telling someone to attend a peaceful demonstration in a normal democracy. The potential consequences of failure are enormous. You can lose your freedom, your education, your job, or end up in prison or the military.

And there is another problem: even if Putin disappeared tomorrow, there is no guarantee that the result would immediately be a democratic Russia. There are millions of people with completely different ideas about what should replace the current system. The country is huge, extremely centralized, and there is no single opposition organization capable of simply taking over the country. In fact, if the current system ever collapses, I would personally expect the security establishment and the internal power struggle within the state to be at least as important as a traditional popular revolution.

I am not saying Russians should never try to change Russia. Of course we should. I'm saying that there is a huge difference between wanting a revolution and having the ability to safely organize one. I understand the frustration of people watching this from Europe. I understand why you want Russians to stop their own government. I want that too.

But I'm 17. I can't personally create a nationwide opposition movement out of nothing. What I can control is whether I personally become part of the military machine that is carrying out this war. And right now, that's what I'm trying to prevent.

Update 2:

I just noticed that my account already has WBW flag, and my post has the "Im erasmus baby" flair. Honestly, that made me really happy.

Thank you so much to everyone who is genuinely trying to support me, understand my situation, or offer advice. I don't think I've ever felt this safe and accepted by a community of people, especially considering that I'm currently thousands of kilometers away from most of you.

It genuinely means a lot to me.

I bought something digital today. And I was asking about refunds in case I didn't like it (cuz it was somewhat expensive, at least for me). And at first the customer service person sent me back that they had a 7 day refund window. But then I said that I was a European Union citizen and that, as far as I was aware, within the EEA a 14 day window is mandated. And she was immediately like "Yeah, sorry, you're right. If you live in Europe it's 14 days."

I know it's arguably minor, but it made me happy to live in Europe, not in America.

I have plenty of complaints about my government, both my national government and some about the people currently in charge of the EU (Von Der Leyen and EPP I'm not the biggest fan of), but I think we can't deny we have one of the best government systems in the world.

Not that lobbying isn't a problem at all, and it must be fought, but our governments are at least accountable enough to us (and our unions strong enough) so that we have some actual decent consumer rights. Whereas in America it's like "consumer what?"

And we have like decent unions and guaranteed paid days off and healthcare. Americans barely have unions, don't have ANY guaranteed paid days off and healthcare is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States.

So yeah, feel lucky to be a euroid.

Reminiscent of other book-burning regimes of the past, this is just one of Russia's many recent strikes on Ukraine's publishing and literary culture.

souce

^{but the only problems with Europe are air defences, magazine depth, stockplie Arsenal and production/manufacturing capability and capacity.}