One day, toward the end of April, Sandan Rabdanov was driving an 18-wheeler through Wyoming when he received a text from a friend. “There was a big raid in Wyoming yesterday. Be careful,” the message read. He needed to skip his rest stop in Rock Springs and leave the state, or risk running into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Rabdanov, 32, is a Russian citizen of the Buryat minority, a Mongol ethnic group living mostly around Lake Baikal in southern Siberia. The message said that two other Buryat truck drivers nearby — one of them a Buddhist lama — had just been arrested by ICE. So Rabdanov kept driving through the night until he cleared the state line. “I felt I was almost busted,” Rabdanov told New Lines, in one of several interviews conducted over the past few months.
Now living in Brooklyn, Rabdanov fled Russia in 2022 for fear of persecution for his activism against the Ukraine war, though that was only the latest among many episodes of feeling targeted and discriminated against.
One thread of the fraught tensions that exist between Russians and Buryats dates back to the 17th century, when Buryat nomadic tribes faced the arrival of Russian Cossacks colonizing the lands around Lake Baikal. In 1727, the Russian Empire and the Qing dynasty established the Sino-Russian border and cut off Buryats from the rest of the Mongol people, who today live mostly in Mongolia and Southern Mongolia (officially known as Inner Mongolia, in China). The Russian conquest was violent, with documented abuses and forced conversions to Christianity.
It was in this borderland, in the village of Tsagan-Chelutai — 130 miles from the junction between Russia, Mongolia and China — that Rabdanov was born in 1994. His father had run a collective farm during the Soviet period and later worked in the district administration. His mother taught English. At home, everyone spoke Buryat. “When I was a toddler, I didn’t know any Russian,” said Rabdanov.
That changed at kindergarten, where Russian was the only language allowed. The district was two-thirds Buryat, but it offered no Buryat classes until ninth grade. In elementary school, walking in the city of Chita with his sister, he tossed away a banana peel, and two Russian elderly ladies called him a monkey. “I didn’t realize what they meant. I was just a little bit ashamed,” he said.
When Rabdanov was 14, Moscow dissolved his district’s autonomous status and merged it into a larger, Russian-dominated region. The adults talked about the lost budget and the lost representatives. He went to university in Chita, where classmates mocked him by pulling the corners of their eyes. Security guards in stores trailed him down the aisles.
In December 2015, Rabdanov was drafted into the Russian military. He quickly learned the unwritten rules of the ranks: Buryats were barred from command and subjected to strict segregation. Grouping was forbidden — even three Buryat men standing in conversation drew suspicion. When Rabdanov chatted in his native tongue with other Buryats, Russian officers cut them off, mocking the language and ordering them to speak only Russian.
The relationship between Buryats and Moscow has historically been hard to frame. Over the decades, some Buryats fully integrated and even thrived within the power structure; others opposed it, at a high price. Many simply tried to survive in a system they understood as the only possible one.
At the start of the Soviet era, the Bolshevik leadership promoted minorities in the context of a multinational Communist state. But by the end of the 1930s, Josef Stalin had changed the Buryat writing system from Mongolian to Cyrillic, executed or arrested all Buryat political leaders and removed the word “Mongolian” from the territory’s official name. “The crises of the Buryat nation were shaped during this period: language loss, an imposed colonial history, and a lack of access to the riches of their own culture,” writes Marina Khankhalain, a Buryat activist, in a recent paper for the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based think tank.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Kremlin once again wanted to appear favorable to local cultures, and in the Russian republic of Buryatia there was some hope for a better future. There was a revival of Buddhism — a fundamental cultural glue for Buryats that was forbidden in the USSR — although it is highly co-opted and controlled by the state. (All Buryat Buddhist authorities and institutions are close to Moscow, and support the war in Ukraine.)
During the 2000s, with Vladimir Putin in power, hope for an autonomous and culturally free Buryatia disappeared. In 2002, 72% of Buryats knew some of their native language. By 2010, the number had dropped to 45%. “It’s basically the same in terms of Russification, but it’s worse in terms of the sheer kind of brutality and oppressiveness of the regime,” Caroline Humphrey, co-founder of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at the University of Cambridge, told New Lines in a phone interview. “In the period of [Boris] Yeltsin, there would be a lot of ethnic dislike, but you were not going to actually punish people for that,” said Humphrey, who conducted her first field study in Buryatia in 1967 and has regularly returned since. “Under Putin, these people who speak out or who seem to be Buryat nationalists, they’re actually criminalized.”
Under a 1992 language law, schools attended by Buryat children were required to teach Buryat. In 2014, amendments to the republic’s education law made studying the language optional.
“Besides killings and assaults of Buryats, routine discrimination spread throughout Russia’s regions and included renting housing only to Slavs and constant identification checks,” Khankhalain writes.
By 2020, Rabdanov was working at a bank. When Putin changed the constitution to extend his rule past 2024, Rabdanov posted that the country was headed for dictatorship: “Putin, President of Russia, in the year of 9999,” he wrote. He continued to post about the COVID-19 pandemic response, rigged elections and corruption.
In January 2021, Rabdanov joined his first street protest, at a demonstration in support of Alexei Navalny in the city of Irkutsk. He also donated money to opposition groups using his Russian credit card, creating a paper trail that Moscow could follow and use to charge him with treason.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Rabdanov went out on a solo protest in Irkutsk, holding a poster that read “No to war — Russia and Ukraine are fraternal peoples.” He recalls a man in plain clothes photographing him up close. “I’m sending it to my friends,” the man said. Passersby called him a “Bandera” (Russia’s all-purpose word for traitor, a reference to the controversial midcentury Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera). When he got home that night, he became so worried for his safety that he didn’t sleep.
In early April, he noticed a car with two men inside — short haircuts, clean-shaven, sunglasses — following him around and sometimes parked near his house. His neighbors had never seen them before. “If I continue to protest, they will try to put me in jail,” he recalled thinking. By late April, two months into the invasion, Rabdanov packed up his life and slipped out of Russia with a few thousand dollars.
Maria Vyushkova, a Buryat who left Russia for the United States in 2010, has conducted the most extensive study of the involvement of Russian minorities in the Ukraine war. Her research shows that Buryatia has by far the highest number of mobilized soldiers killed per capita of any Russian region, with the current rate 22 times higher than in Moscow (the peak was in March 2023, when Buryatia had a rate more than 100 times higher than the capital). “They were among the first to be thrown into the meat grinder,” she wrote in an email.
In September 2022, Putin ordered the mobilization for the war. In Buryatia, army recruiters went door to door, sometimes in the middle of the night, carrying draft notices. Many Buryats fled to Mongolia, where families have kept in touch with distant relatives for generations. But many others were sent to the front lines. “Buryats, as well as some other ethnic minority groups, may have suffered disproportionate losses and disproportionate conscription … raising questions of systematic racism and even suspicions of ethnic cleansing in Russia,” writes Kristina Jonutyte, a social anthropologist at Vilnius University, in her book “Between the Buddha and the New Tsar: Urban Religion and Minority Politics at the Asian Borderlands of Russia” (2026).
But conscription is not the only reason for the high death toll. Many Buryats have positions in the state economy or in the military, and many support the government. “There are very few employment opportunities outside governmental positions,” Vyushkova said in a phone interview. “I think in any family there are relatives who benefit from this war. And because of that, people are just trying not to discuss this.”
“This is not to say that Russia’s minorities are merely pretending to support Russia’s politics – many of them certainly do,” Jonutyte writes in her book. “But it is to say that they live under conditions where there do not seem to be alternatives (outside of violence, imprisonment, and sometimes death), and so this support – however deep or shallow it may be – appears as a necessary precondition for survival under the current repressive regime.”
In June, Moscow opened a criminal case against Vyushkova for “spreading misinformation” about the Russian army in Ukraine. “It’s back to kind of Stalinist methods,” Humphrey said.
Rabdanov traveled through Uzbekistan, Turkey and Mexico before crossing into the U.S. near Yuma to apply for asylum. His hopes were fueled by the Joe Biden administration’s welcoming stance toward Russian dissidents. He spoke English and believed that, in the U.S., his Asian features wouldn’t mark him as an outsider. More than that, it was about physical safety. “The only country where the Russian intelligence services cannot take you is the United States,” he said. He settled down in Brooklyn and began driving long-haul freight all over the country. In November 2025, after more than three years of waiting, he received the verdict on his asylum request from an immigration court. It was denied.
Rabdanov connects his personal predicament to a much older collective memory. “In our history, we had to flee our lands a few times,” he said. “My parents, they know the history, how our people fled Russia during the Soviet Union, during the Russian Empire. It’s in our genetics.”
Rabdanov’s asylum denial comes amid the overall decline in asylum case approvals since the Donald Trump administration purged immigration judges who did not align with its anti-immigration policies. “Approval rates have plummeted,” said Rabdanov’s lawyer Gianvito Grieco, who has worked on dozens of Buryat cases. “And for them it’s something to be proud of,” he said, referring to the Trump administration. Rabdanov has appealed his asylum denial case, but Grieco said that the first ruling is rarely overturned.
“The cards are stacked against the migrants,” he said in a phone interview. If ICE detained Rabdanov, his appeal would probably be fast-tracked, likely leading to his immediate deportation. If sent back to Russia, he would be at risk of immediate conscription into the war in Ukraine or imprisonment for his opposition to it.
Alternatively, the U.S. could deport him to a third country (usually in Africa or Central America) with which Washington has reached agreements to receive asylum-seekers denied refugee status in the U.S. Grieco said the procedure is constantly changing, and it is not clear what the policy is for deported Russian citizens at the moment. What is certain is that, over the last few years, dozens of Russian deportees have been forcefully sent back to Russia, and in many cases arrested upon arrival.
Meanwhile, since leaving Russia, Rabdanov has engaged in political activities that are considered serious crimes by Moscow, like attending events held by the Free Nationals of Post-Russia Forum in 2023 in New York City, his work with Buryat rights groups and donations to pro-Ukraine movements, which have all been reclassified in Russia as terrorism and high treason.
In October 2023, he suspected that Russian security services had traced his activity in a Buryat opposition channel on the Telegram messaging service. Soon after, his personal details appeared on pro-Kremlin channels with death threats and the word “traitor.” Leaked authority databases from 2022 and 2024 show his name flagged as “opposition.”
When he is not driving across the U.S., Rabdanov stays in Brooklyn. He knows what a flight back would mean: the police database in Irkutsk, a holding cell or a uniform for a war to which he is a conscientious objector, where he would be sent as cannon fodder. The text warning from a friend in Wyoming was hardly an isolated scare, but a sign of how thin the ice under his feet has become. Over the course of weeks of interviewing him, he ceased talking much about the future. Between a homeland that wants to consume him and a host country preparing to expel him, perhaps the parked 18-wheeler, waiting for its next load, is now the only space he feels truly belongs to him.
This story was produced with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism (FIJ). It is part of an ongoing joint investigation between the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism and New Lines Magazine.
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