One year after mobilization, Turkey's immigration policies are driving Russians away
"Full of Russians." That’s how Mural Çekin described Kadıköy last year.
After Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin announced a partial mobilization on Sept. 21, 2022 – requiring more citizens to join the war effort in Ukraine – Çekin watched thousands of Russians looking to avoid military service stream into the bustling Asian-side neighborhood of İstanbul.
As the owner of a modest bistro called Güneş Cafe, Çekin quickly began offering consulting services for residency permits, targeting incoming Russians by placing ads in Cyrillic on his storefront window.
Along with affordable tea, Turkish coffee and modest local dishes, Çekin, with the help of a Turkmen waitress fluent in Turkish and Russian, served up immigration advice and business boomed.
At least, until approval rates for new residency permits plummeted.
"They [Russians] used get resident permits here. But later it became more difficult for foreigners to get resident permits," Çekin told Turkey recap. "Now they are barely here anymore."
By late Dec. 2022, a growing number of Russians in Turkey began receiving notifications their visas and residency permit had been declined. Previously, securing permission for short-term stays in Turkey had been relatively easy for Russian citizens, but something changed.
While the reasoning and process behind immigration decisions remains opaque, the result is most Russians that fled to Turkey after the mobilization have since left the country. Most have since sought refuge in Georgia, Montenegro, Armenia, and Serbia instead – though a smaller number have also remained in Turkey without legal immigration status.
For Çekin, the consistent rejection of newcomers forced him to abandon the consultancy side hustle. The same story played out, down the street, where Igor, a St. Petersburg native runs Café Grao. Igor requested to withhold his last name.
"Kadıköy was kind of like a Russian district," he told Turkey recap, adding newcomers often needed help dealing with local bureaucracy and, at times, culture shock.
"There were a lot of people who were not ready to go abroad. Some [were] 50-year-old guys who were abroad for the first time from Russia."
In response, his café also transformed into a hub for freshly-arrived Russians, hosting language lessons or helping people get sim cards. But as time passed, and the number of Russians receiving permit rejections increased, Igor noticed many new faces didn’t stick around long.
"We have been working for one year now, and our regular customers have changed maybe four or five times," he said.
"From the first wave [those who arrived in February and March 2022] definitely 90 percent of them left. Because they didn't get an İkamet [residence permit] or something else," he added, noting new individuals continue to arrive to try their luck.
Tighter regulations
Çekin's and Igor's experiences are indicative of how Turkey's tighter residency permit regulations forced many Russian exiles to relocate. Currently, Russians are permitted to stay in Turkey for a maximum of 60-90 days on a tourist visa, after which they are required to get a residence permit.
Until recently, obtaining short-term residency permits was relatively easy. In comparison to the 'golden visa' option, which requires substantial investments in exchange for residence permits or citizenship, simply citing touristic reasons was often enough to secure legal residency for a minimum of one year in Turkey – making tourist permits popular among Russians after the full invasion of Ukraine.
In 2022, Russians accounted for 25 percent of all migrants, making them the top group of new arrivals. A year prior, they didn't even make the top five. Additionally, Russian citizens holding short-term residence permits more than doubled from about 65,000 in 2021 to 146,000 at the end of 2022, moving from sixth to first place.
Currently, they remain the leading group holding temporary residence, despite a slight drop to 136,000 as of Sept. 7, 2023.
The latest surge came after a broader increase in short-term residency permit holders from 178,964 in 2005 to 1.2 million in 2023. A total of 5.4 million foreigners live in Turkey today, including some 3.6 million registered Syrian refugees, and roughly 350,000 asylum seekers.
These growing numbers of international residents, along with a rising tide of xenophobic sentiments particularly targeting Syrians, resulted in intensified policies over the years to limit the number of foreigners residing in specific areas, while also increasing deportation rates.
On June 11, 2022, then-Interior Min. Süleyman Soylu responded to the public pressure by announcing that from Feb. 10, 2022, first-time residence permit applicants who cited tourist reasons were being routinely denied to combat the permit’s 'misuse'.
"I don’t really know what was the reason behind this easy way of accessing a residence permit," Hasan Basri Bülbül, an assistant professor at Boğaziçi University's Faculty of Law, told Turkey recap.
He added the government had plans to restrict tourist residence permits, but the roll out was delayed by the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Eventually, the new rules were applied a few weeks before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, which in turn resulted in Russians and Ukrainians being temporarily exempt from the ban on obtaining a residence permit based on touristic reasons, Bülbül explained.
The exemption lasted until Dec. 26, 2022, "then we started to see the news that the applications of Russian people were being rejected. But Ukrainians remained in a privileged position," Bülbül said.
The sudden ban on tourist permits for Russians came without any public statement—a common occurrence, according to Bülbül.
Turkey’s migration authority did not reply to multiple requests for comment for this report.
Various residency permit consultancy agencies have confirmed to Turkey recap that first-time applicants seeking short-term residency permits for tourism purposes are currently being denied at high rates, regardless of their nationality, while expressing uncertainty about when or if these permits will be easier to attain in the near future.
"Migrants get a kind of false assumption that they can stay in Turkey long-term easily, and then they start to make their lives according to this assumption," Bülbül said. "They [Russians] were made kind of privileged and then this privilege was taken away. They became like the rest."
Escaping ‘morguelization’
"The change was really dramatic," Eva Rapoport told Turkey recap, referring to the shift in residence permit approvals. She coordinates the İstanbul division of "The Ark", an organization aiding Russians in exile.
"It was affecting a lot of people who came because of the mobilization," Rapoport said. "A lot of people got rejected. And those were the people who found an apartment and brought their family in."
Among those who were denied a permit was Dmitri, an IT engineer and musician in his mid-40s, who withheld his last name.
Unwilling to risk being "morguelized" in the war zone, as he put it, Dmitri hastily uprooted his life from St. Petersburg to Kadıköy in September. Soon after, his wife and son followed, but their aspirations to remain in Turkey were quickly dashed.
"I expected the Ikamet rejection," he calmly explained. "Me and my friend, we applied at the same time and we received the message the same day on the 31st of January."
Dmitri eventually opted to move to Montenegro, saying he didn’t want his son to go to school in Russia, a society he perceived as drenched in military propaganda.
Other Russians in a similar position have chosen to remain in the country without legal status, living in constant fear that authorities will conduct raids and deport them, Rapoport said.
"Some people were choosing to roll a dice,” Rapoport said. "What can they do? Move again? Immediately to yet another unfamiliar country or just stay a little bit longer till they figure out what's their next destination," Rapoport said, adding that she felt a sense of sadness when she realized people started to leave in Spring 2023.
"There was this hope that İstanbul could become some kind of a cultural hub for the Russian anti-war diaspora," she said.
One of those who decided to stay despite rejection is Arty, a 25-year-old model who arrived in İstanbul during the war's outset, and withheld his last name. While initially obtaining a tourist residence permit, his extension was denied in March 2023. He challenged the refusal with a lawyer, placing him in legal limbo.
"They [the police] don't know how to treat you when you're in the gray zone," Arty told Turkey recap, adding that his friend in a similar ambiguous status was recently halted on the street by authorities and held at the police station several hours before being released.
"They are stopping everybody on the streets now to check documents. They stopped me six times in the last few months," he remarked.
Arty's fear of deportation to Russia in specific, makes him feel paralyzed and predominantly confines him to his home. The chances of winning a case against a refusal decision is "quite low," Bülbül clarified.
Scapegoats
Turkish authorities' abrupt and undisclosed policy change after the mobilization has further fueled suspicions of the political motives at play.
Some believe their refusals stemmed from social discontent caused by Turkey's economic woes, which in turn saw Russians become scapegoats for the country's skyrocketing housing prices. Multiple Turkish provinces saw housing prices more than double in a year – claiming some of the sharpest rent increases in the world for 2022.
According to government statistics, property sales to foreigners across Turkey rose by 15.2 percent in 2022. Russians emerged as the predominant buyers, acquiring over 16,000 properties last year – a 203 percent surge compared to 2021, making up a quarter of all property sales by foreign buyers.
Reactions against rising housing costs produced a petition in November 2022 – signed by over 20,000 people – aiming to prevent foreigners from buying property in Antalya, a popular Mediterranean hub for Russians.
Çekin echoed similar sentiments about the situation in Kadıköy. He said he respects Russians as "honorable, noble and genuine people", but said they can inflate housing prices due to their lack of knowledge about local market values.
Others think, without providing clear evidence, there might have been an arrangement between Moscow and Ankara to deny refuge to Russian individuals who fled the war to compel them to return to Russia and participate in the war.
"The Russian government might have requested that Turkey doesn't provide an easy stay for Russian people because those who come to Turkey are escaping the mobilization," Bülbül speculated.
Though Bülbül said the shift in policy is probably due to heightened xenophobic sentiments that created public pressure on the government, in particular ahead of the May 2023 elections.
"The racist remarks and discrimination against refugees and migrants is increasing unfortunately in Turkey, so this creates a certain public pressure on the government," Bülbül said.
During the May elections, Turkish Pres. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s main rival, CHP chair Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, also stirred up anti-immigrant sentiments in attempt to win the presidency, campaigning to send Syrians back to their country.
"I mean the racist remarks don't really target Russians or Ukrainians," Bülbül said. "It's mostly refugees and irregular migrants maybe, but it affects the situation of migrants who are legally staying in Turkey as well as all foreigners."
Café Grao owner, Igor, said that under the present circumstances, nearly everyone faces rejection, regardless of nationality.
"I had many friends from Europe who didn't get it [residence permit] also so it's not just for Syrians, Russians, Americans, whatever, they just don't give it to anyone right now," Igor said.
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You can have lived in Turkey for decades, invested money, bought a house, have Turkish ID, driver's license, health insurance and have had five-year residence permits and been an exemplary citizen. Yet you now have a residence permit for only two years and are not sure if it will be renewed. The path for foreigners of all and any nationality in Türkiye (with the possible exception of Germans) has altered many times over, based on capricious politics.