‘Another North Korea?’ Why some are pushing back on banning Russians from things

Artemi Meshcherin just wants to study philosophy.

But the invasion of Ukraine has thrown a wrench into his life after the 20-year-old Russian student at the University of British Columbia learned that due to economic sanctions imposed on his home country, his tuition money could no longer get to him.

Meshcherin’s parents live in Russia and are his main source of income — as he’s on a student visa, he can only work part-time.

“I’m in quite a precarious situation where I’m struggling to find a source of income that would cover my tuition bills,” he told the Star during an interview. “I’m close to saying that I’m desperate and I’m using all means that I can potentially have access to, to make sure that this problem is not being silenced.”

Meshcherin told his story on television recently and afterward had students in similar situations from across Canada reaching out to talk to him, but he says they’re “scared to speak about this.

“A lot of people are scared of repercussions they might face.”

He’s one of many average Russians affected by the global crisis sparked by their country’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s something of a side effect to the distancing happening currently between the western and Russian governments: everyday Russians getting caught in the middle of outrage over state actions.

As soon as the invasion began, people across the world started cutting off Russia at the speed of a chef’s knife on a chopping board.

Sanctions on powerful Russians were slapped into place, dozens of massive business ties got severed, and important exports cancelled. Many of these measures will mean severe consequences for Russia in the wake of President Vladimir Putin’s widely condemned decision to invade.

However, there are warnings that too much distance — in the form of academic boycotts and barring athletes from competitions, for example — might be ineffective or, worse, could cause rifts that do more harm than good in the long run.

This week, Belarusian and Russian athletes were expelled from the Paralympic Games in Beijing. The Toronto International Film Festival also announced that it would suspend film organizations and media outlets backed by the Russian state, but still support independent Russian filmmakers. (The Glasgow Film Festival, now underway, has dropped two Russian films it said had been funded by the Kremlin.)

Groups from many aspects of civic and social life have been doing or considering doing similar things in countries around the world. Talk has swirled around sports leagues possibly barring Russian athletes; academics have been considering whether to boycott Russian scholars and their research.

Others have been pushing back.

Dan Milstein, an NHL player agent who left Ukraine as a political refugee in the early 1990s, sounded the alarm on Twitter this week about what he said was an imminent decision by the Canadian Hockey League (CHL) — the top junior-hockey league in the world — to ban Russian and Belarusian players from its upcoming draft. He posted that he does “not believe banning teenagers for something they do not control is the answer.”

“I’m extremely worried about what’s happening to my hometown (Kyiv) and my country of Ukraine,” he told the Star in an interview. “My home that I lived in for the first 16 years of my life is being bombed right now. My friends are running for their lives right now.

“But at the same time, punishing innocent 16- and 17-year-old children isn’t a solution.”

The CHL has so far not implemented such a ban on players but released a statement stating it condemned the invasion by Russia and that it would cancel the 2022 Canada Russia Series.

The International Ice Hockey Federation announced that it would suspend Russian and Belarusian national teams and clubs from all IIHF events “until further notice.” The IIHF also said it would withdraw the 2023 World Junior Championship hosting rights from Russia. A swath of other sporting sanctions have been slapped on Russia as well, including it being suspended from the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

Academic and scientific ties are now also being scrutinized in some countries. For example, Germany’s government has halted all collaboration with Russia on science and research, going so far as to deactivate a space telescope hunting for black holes, a joint project with Russia’s space agency.

Valentina Erastova, a scientist at the University of Edinburgh who grew up in Russia, raised concerns about talk she had heard about barring Russians in the academic world. On Twitter, she said there should be no boycott of Russians from scholarly publications and conferences.

“Of course, Ukraine is a terrible situation,” Erastova told the Star during an interview. “But then, do we want to create another North Korea out of Russia?”

For those who think banning Russians from such things will help put domestic pressure on Putin, she had a dire message: “He doesn’t give a f–k.”

Putin is “in his world” and “not OK,” she said. Russians are already living in poverty and facing human-rights abuses there, and academics facing boycotts likely won’t change much about his foreign policy, she added.

“They are actually our allies. In the sense of, like, western world interest of peace,” she said of Russian researchers facing boycott talk. “Penalizing them by not allowing them to do anything anymore is just wrong… it’s not what humanity is about.”

Erastova said she believes moves being made to bar Russians from various organizations and events, not just in academia, are an easy way for people to show outrage about the invasion.

“Nobody has a clue what just happened,” she said. “And then they feel like… ‘we need to take action now and make sure it’s very clear that we are taking an action.’”

Sanctions on powerful Russians and on things that make the state a lot of money are effective, she said, but not punishing Russian people who have nothing to do with the actions of the state.

Some measures already taken are predicted to have a significant impact on the country. The $14-billion Nord Stream-2 for supplying Germany with natural gas, once expected to be a major boon to Russia, has been cancelled. Countries around the world have frozen the assets of Russian oligarchs and banks. More than 100 companies have begun pulling out of Russia and the country has been told it would see some of its banks barred from SWIFT, the global financial messaging system.

Paul Goode, the McMillan Chair in Russian Studies at Carleton University, said that people must carefully consider restricting everyday Russians.

Some of the bans, especially in the sports world, make sense if you’re trying to cripple “economic as well as public relations assets,” he said. Russia has been trying to “remake itself,” particularly since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, partly through international sports competitions, Goode said.

However, the academic discussion is complex because Russian universities are predominantly reliant on the state’s budget, Goode said. Still, “we can cut ties with Russian universities,” he said, but it doesn’t mean “we have to severe ties individually with the Russian scholars and academics, who, many of them, are shocked and appalled by this war.”

“It’s a very fine line and it’s a difficult one,” he said. “It’s one that requires each of us to sort of consider what are our own moral thresholds at this point.”

Russians might also perceive widespread sanctions as confirmation of an important idea in their state’s propaganda: that the West is Russophobic, said Goode.

I have suggested that western institutions would do more good by “helping Russians to realize their own interests by helping them to support whatever actions they can bring about to support anti-war movements in Russia, or simply just to contribute to the relief effort for the war inUkraine.”

Goode says the invasion was launched without having support from the public in Russia and at “Putin is clearly unconstrained by public opinion now.

“If we think about the likely implications of this war as being a long-term struggle, then what we need are, you know, Russians, especially Russians abroad, as allies, more than anything else.”