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By David Brennan
Diplomatic Correspondent
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A senior Russian politician considered part of President Vladimir Putin's "inner circle" has called on Russian emigrants to return to the country they fled in the aftermath of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, claiming that "hysteria" in Western nations makes it unsafe for them to remain abroad.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the State Duma—the lower house of Russia's Federal Assembly—appealed to citizens abroad on Telegram on Monday to "finally" reverse their decision to flee.
"Today there is an opportunity to return, tomorrow with the hysteria that is escalating in Western Europe, it may no longer be," wrote Volodin, who has previously served as an aide to Putin, a deputy prime minister, and is partially credited with the president's increasingly nationalistic ideological turn in recent years.
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"In order to better understand the situation around those who left, it is enough to familiarize yourself with the statement of the Czech president, who invited Russian citizens living abroad to be sent to concentration camps," Volodin wrote, misrepresenting President Petr Pavel's recent remarks.
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Pavel—one of the most ardent supporters of Ukraine and critics of Russia among European Union and NATO leaders—said last week that while he sympathized with the plight of Russians who had fled the Kremlin's war, "when there is an ongoing war, the security measures related to Russian nationals should be stricter than in normal times."
"All Russians living in Western countries should be monitored much more than in the past because they are citizens of a nation that leads an aggressive war," Pavel said in an interview with the Prague-based, U.S.-financed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. "That's simply the cost of war."
Russian state media quickly picked up on the comments, equating Pavel's interview with a call to intern Russian citizens, noting the president's mention of the World War Two-era U.S. internment camps for people of Japanese descent.
Presidential spokesperson Markéta Řeháková later told AFP that Pavel was in no way suggesting internment or persecution of Russian citizens.
Still, Volodin is among the Kremlin-aligned figures looking to leverage the comments to help frame Moscow's war on Ukraine as a wider, forced confrontation with the West. "After such words, our citizens, still remaining in Western countries, need to think about where they went, what they found, and what awaits them," Volodin wrote on Telegram.
Some 900,000 Russians are thought to have left the country since the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Moscow has sought to keep the door open to returnees, with Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov saying in March that the government intends to retain a dialogue with those who fled abroad.
Newsweek has contacted the Russian Foreign Ministry to request comment.
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