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‘Just an ordinary guy’ How a young Russian man fled violence in Syria, faced political charges in Moscow, won asylum in Estonia, and joined the war on the side of Ukraine

Source: Meduza

Story by Kristina Safonova. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale.

25-year-old Dani Akel Tammam was born in Moscow but moved to Aleppo with his father after his parents separated when he was just three years old. Throughout his childhood, he continued to visit his mother in Moscow, and in the late 2000s, realizing an armed conflict was brewing in Syria, he moved back to Russia permanently. “We had to leave everything behind,” he told Meduza. “Many of my relatives were killed.” After a stint in the Russian military, he enrolled in university and soon began attending pro-democracy protests, which led to police beatings, threats against his family, and, ultimately, criminal charges. Then came Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Shortly after the war began, Akel illegally crossed into Estonia on foot and requested asylum. He’s now serving as part of the Freedom of Russia Legion, a formation of Russian soldiers fighting for Ukraine. Meduza tells his story.

Update: The Freedom of Russia Legion announced on March 27, 2024, that Dani Akel Tammam had died in combat.

A protester

It was the summer of 2021 in Moscow’s Preobrazhensky District Court. A young man wearing a palm tree-patterned t-shirt and brightly colored shorts rolled up to the stand on roller skates, leaving Judge Marina Leonova in disbelief.

“Where do you think you’re going like that?” she asked.

“I was running late again,” he replied.

The trial was part of the “Sanitary Case,” a legal action launched in January 2021 that targets nearly a dozen supporters of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny. State investigators alleged that by calling for people to attend pro-Navalny protests in the wake of his arrest, the suspects incited them to violate pandemic restrictions. The defendants faced up to two years in prison.

One of the defendants in the room was municipal deputy and Pussy Riot member Lucy Shtein, who sent out several tweets just before the demonstration in support of Navalny:

Now, investigators wanted Dani Akel — the young man on roller skates — to testify against Shtein and say it was her tweets that had spurred him to join the rally.

* * *

On Instagram, Akel seemed like any other Russian man in his early twenties. One picture from those days shows him sitting on a sofa with a bottle of whisky; another shows him sitting around a hookah with his friends.

Akel described himself to Meduza as "just an ordinary guy." In school, he said, he was interested in history and politics. By the time he was 16, he’d had a realization: “People are happier in countries that operate according to democratic principles.” He decided then and there that he would do whatever he could to change Russia. Four years later, he enlisted in the Russian army.

“It seemed to me that I could build a military career and use it to become a vanguard of democratic changes in the army,” he recounted. “That was, in part, a fantasy. I have an active imagination.”

During his year as a sniper on Russia’s border, he abandoned this idea. “I saw enough of what was happening in the Russian army,” he explained. “The army is in decline. It’s destroyed.”

After returning to Moscow, he applied to the philosophy department at the Russian State University for the Humanities. He got to work as soon as he enrolled, organizing “all kinds of events” such as concerts and art exhibits. Then, in January 2021, he was arrested at a protest for the first time.

Akel had protested against anti-democratic policies and initiatives before, and after Alexey Navalny’s arrest upon returning from Germany, he couldn’t stand aside, he told Meduza. He'd recently been infected with COVID-19, but after a test came back negative, he decided to go out and show his support for the jailed dissident.

At the protest, he was arrested and then beaten by police, he told Meduza. Before long, the country’s state-controlled news channel caught wind of the fact that he had violated quarantine rules to attend the demonstration, and it became a major media story.

“Things immediately started to crack,” he said in a YouTube video at the time. “Not just for me, by any means; for my whole family. There were threatening calls — not with direct threats, but nevertheless, when your parents get calls from work and things like that, it makes you scared. Not so much for yourself as for your family.”

Nonetheless, on January 31, he attended another protest. Once again, he was arrested and beaten by police. “You go out in your own city, in the country where you’re a citizen, to express your opinion about something you don’t like, and these gangsters come and beat you. And you still have to pay for it,” Akel told Meduza. He was fined 20,000 rubles ($264) for participating in an unauthorized rally.

After thousands of arrests and numerous instances of violence against protesters, the demonstrations in support of Navalny gradually ceased. It seemed to Akel that the authorities’ interest in him was also waning. But in early April, the Russian Investigative Committee sent him a summons in the mail, calling him to serve as a witness in the “Sanitary Case.”

At first, he ignored the summons. On April 20, however, two officers from the government’s Center for Combating Extremism showed up at his home and took him to the Moscow Investigative Committee's main office. That’s when he learned that he was no longer a witness in the case; he was now a suspect.

A witness for the prosecution

Akel didn’t deny that he had broken pandemic rules to attend a protest. “Given the circumstances, saying, ‘I didn’t violate quarantine rules, I plead not guilty!’ would have been stupid,” said his lawyer, Mikhail Biryukov. Instead, he agreed to a plea deal in which the judge would be unable to sentence him to more than two thirds of the maximum penalty under the law. “The investigation assumed that after entering the deal and pleading guilty, Akel would go further and name the individuals whose appeals were responsible for him going to the protest,” Biryukov said.

The court imposed a number of pre-trial restrictions on Akel, such as prohibiting him from leaving home between 10:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m. or communicating with other defendants in the case. Akel told Meduza that the months leading up to his hearing were emotionally difficult. “I was stressed out by the thought that I would either have to flee the country or go to prison,” he said. “Russian prison is an awful, awful experience for anybody.” He rapidly lost weight during this period.

While his friends were supportive of him, his parents were largely unsympathetic:

Shortly before his case went to trial, according to Akel, the head of the investigation team called him at his home and asked him to go outside, saying they needed to talk. “I went out and talked to him one-on-one. He was trying to get into my head,” said Akel. “But I never once considered making a deal with the devil.”

At the same time, Akel understood that no matter what he did, the defendants in the case and their supporters would suspect him of secretly working for the prosecution. He recounted one instance in which Oleg Navalny, another defendant in the Sanitary Case, told him: “We have practically no doubt that you’ve been bought off and are helping them achieve some predetermined outcome.” (Navalny himself told Meduza that he never spoke to Akel and “never said such a thing,” but he does remember Akel serving as a witness for the prosecution.)

“When we didn’t know anything about him and hadn’t seen his interviews, we thought this was just some false witness who they’d enlisted to testify against us,” said Sanitary Case defendant Lucy Shtein. “But he ended up speaking honestly [in court], saying he hadn’t read our Twitter posts and that going to the protest had been his own idea.”

In August 2021, Moscow judge Marina Leonova sentenced Shtein to a year of partial house arrest. Other suspects were given similar sentences; many of them, including Shtein, soon left Russia. Dani Akel was fined 100,000 rubles ($1,370).

Akel spent the next year in a deep depression, he told Meduza. He was expelled from his university for protesting, and he lost all motivation to work. At the same time, because of his conviction, the police calling him in multiple times per month for questioning. “They tried to train me to live and think the way they wanted me to,” he said. “They said all the same old stuff: that all [the protests] were funded by the West, that Western countries want to destroy our country, and that I was giving my life up for people who don't care about me.”

Sometimes these “interviews” would be held at his home; police officers would show up along with plainclothes agents who Akel believes worked for Center E, or the Center for Combating Extremism. “So many years of work had been wiped away. I would look at the ceiling and think, how did this happen? What was I supposed to do now? It wasn’t clear how I could organize my life at that point.”

Then Russia invaded Ukraine. The start of the full-scale war hit Akel “harder than the felony charge,” he told Meduza. “It was horrifying to realize that Russia had actually done it. Because the consequences for the country will be disastrous. That much was clear, especially when the first convoys of Russia tanks entered, when the photos of corpses came out. I was livid,” he said.

Most of Akel’s friends supported the war, and he didn’t foresee them changing their minds no matter what. These was only one thing left to do, he said: “I had to take up arms and fight back.”

A fugitive

“The plan was very simple and, it seemed to me, very solid,” said Dani Akel. He would cross into Latvia, show up at the Ukrainian Embassy, and declare his wish to join the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU).

He announced his intentions in a video that he posted on Instagram. Then, in mid-March 2022, he left home.

Akel was on a train from Moscow to St. Petersburg when his relatives told him the authorities had come to search their house. “The police tried to break into my mom’s place," he said. "They said they were going to open a second criminal case against me, this time for extremism.”

Rather than lingering in St. Petersburg, he decided to take the first taxi he could find and go to Pskov, the nearest city to the Latvian border. He planned to enter Latvia illegally.

“I was sure they wouldn’t let me out of the country. Especially since I’d posted a video announcing where I was going and what I planned to do,” he told Meduza.

Due to the difficult terrain, both of Akel’s first two attempts to cross the border failed. He wanted to try one last time, but when he went back to the hotel in Pskov where he’d left most of his things, he learned that the authorities had already come by looking for him. “I didn’t even go up to my room," he said. "I turned around and got out of Dodge.”

This time, he headed for the Estonian border. He turned his phone off to ensure he wasn’t being tracked, leaving himself with only a compass and a paper map to navigate through the forest.

“A lot of critters, all kinds of birds,” he recounted. “There were fresh bear tracks. I was a little nervous. There was also a small river, which was unpleasant — I fell into it and got wet. Next to the border, there were guards on patrol. When I saw them, I forgot about the birds and the bears and everything, and I lay down in a bush and waited.”

When the coast appeared clear, Akel continued walking until he reached a barbed wire fence. He climbed over it, thinking, “Wow, I crossed the border. Cool!” 300 meters (about 1,000 feet) later, however, he encountered another, bigger barbed wire fence.

At first, Akel couldn’t figure out how to get over the fence, so he just walked along it for a while. “Then, I just removed my outer clothing, threw it over the barbed wire, and climbed over it that way,” he said.

On March 26, 2022, Dani Akel found himself in Estonia for the first time in his life. “I didn’t flee [Russia],” he insists. “I’ve just left the country temporarily — until we deal with this government. I’ll certainly be back.”

A refugee

Akel soon found himself in Estonia's Temporary Detention Center, a facility in a suburb of Tallinn that he refers to as a "prison." The center is divided into two parts: one for suspects under investigation and one for migrants who have illegally crossed the border and are awaiting legal proceedings.

Not everyone who requests asylum ends up in the facility, according to Uliana Ponomareva, a lawyer for the Estonian Human Rights Center: most asylum seekers are allowed to live in open institutions while awaiting the government’s response, and are only required to be there at night. But the Estonian Police and Border Guard can request a person be held in custody in certain situations, such as if he presents a security risk or if there’s reason to believe he will try to escape. The court found the latter argument convincing: “When Akel was first detained, he said he would go to Ukraine to fight against Russia,” said Ponomareva. “That meant that he would most likely leave Estonia before a decision was made regarding international protection, and this was the basis for his detention.”

According to Akel, there was no way to communicate with the outside world. In May 2022, however, two months after he was detained, he managed to get Internet access. “I wrote to Lucy Shtein,” he told Meduza. “I remembered that she had fled to the Baltic countries. We knew each other from our criminal case. We weren’t close friends or anything, but we’d spoken before.”

After sentencing Shtein to a year of “restricted freedom of movement” in the “Sanitary Case,” the court had ordered her to wear a tracking device. In April 2022, she posted a video online that showed her cutting the tracker from her ankle. “Separation is a small death, but I’ve been forced to end my relationship with the Russian Federation,” Shtein wrote on Twitter. She added: "This isn't an escape; it's a special fucking-off operation.”

Shtein told Meduza that Akel’s message came as a surprise. “He had a foreign passport and no tracking bracelet. It seemed to me that in that situation, there are easier ways to get out of Russia [than crossing the border illegally],” she said. “But he’d done it, so I had to help him.”

Shtein didn’t know any Estonian human rights advocates, so she made a post on Facebook. She soon got a response from Konstantin Chadlin, an activist from Russia who had received asylum in Estonia in 2018 and had been helping people in situations similar to his ever since.

Chadlin went to visit Dani Akel. “He said he condemned the war and wanted to fight for Ukraine," Chadlin explained. "A hot-blooded young man. What else is there to say? I advised him to concentrate on obtaining legal status."

Thanks to Chadlin, the Estonian Human Rights Center learned about Akel's case. Since the start of the full-scale war, lawyer Uliana Ponomareva told Meduza, the agency’s workload had increased by a factor of five. “We used to get about 100 applications [for asylum] from all countries each year. But in the first six months of 2023, we got 107. A plurality of them, nearly half, were from Russia,” she said.

Ponomareva began working on Akel's case in June 2022. By early August, he was released. According to Ponomareva, challenging his detention was difficult: “We built our argument on the fact that the desire to go fight for Ukraine wasn’t his only goal, and that he actually qualified for international protection based on his political views,” she said.

Shortly after his release from detention, Akel was granted asylum and given a refugee passport as well as a residence permit in Estonia. Still, he didn’t abandon his plan to go to Ukraine. “Even I’m surprised, to be honest,” he told Meduza. “In prison, I started to feel that maybe I was crazy or I had an obsession. Because a lot of people would have called it quits already, but I just kept pushing forward.”

“I didn’t take it seriously,” Lucy Shtein said of Akel’s plan to join the war. “A lot of people say they’ll go, but few people actually walk the walk.”

In the short time they’d known each other back in Russia, Shtein had gotten the impression that Akel was a “well-groomed Moscow boy” and “a bit hipster.” “If you had asked me which of my friends would go fight for the AFU, I wouldn’t have chosen him,” she said.

The fact that he stayed the course came as a pleasant surprise to Shtein. “To stay committed to a decision like that, you have to have a strong inner conviction. It means he believes in a free Russia. He believes it’s possible.”

“These people see a different scenario,” Konstantin Chadlin said of Dani Akel and the other Russians who have chosen to fight on the side of Ukraine. “They see a historic opportunity in this situation. They understand that freedom comes through the rifle.”

A foreign fighter

After numerous fruitless letters and calls to Ukrainian military officials and two unsuccessful attempts to enter Ukraine from Poland, Dani got in touch with the Freedom of Russia Legion, a volunteer battalion made up of Russian citizens that began forming in March 2022 and had small groups on the battlefield by the end of the summer.

“At the start of the full-scale war, according to Ukrainian law, citizens of the aggressor countries (Russia and Belarus) were prohibited from joining the AFU," representatives of the group told Meduza. "At the same time, a large number of Russians emerged who, due to their own moral principles, could not stand idly by. It was extremely important to create legal standards that would give all volunteers social benefits while also preventing Russian intelligence services from infiltrating. This is one reason why the division took so long to form.”

Little is known about the Freedom of Russia Legion. It hasn’t released data about its size, and little is known about its role in the progression of the war so far. But its objectives, on the other hand, are very clear. The unit’s most widely discussed Telegram post reads: “Without a doubt, the most humiliated and disempowered nationality in the Russian Federation are the Russians. Any attempt to defend their national interests leads to accusations of chauvinism.”

The post goes on to assert that the legion’s task is to “maintain a unified and indivisible Russia in the borders established in 1991,” where “every nationality will be heard” and “have the opportunity to preserve its culture and its time-honored way of life,” and where the regions will all become more economically and financially independent. The statement ends with the words: “God help us in our sacred struggle! For Russia! For freedom!”

The Legion of Russia is an official unit of the Ukrainian Defense Forces. “We coordinate all of our actions on Ukrainian territory with the AFU’s command,” the formation’s press service has said. In addition, it receives support from former Russian State Duma deputy Ilya Ponomarev, who currently lives in Ukraine.

Last August, Ponomarev, who said he represents another secretive pro-Ukraine group called the National Republic Army, and a Freedom of Russia fighter with the callsign Caesar signed an agreement known as the Irpin Declaration. Among other things, the document proclaims:

The idea of a free Russia is one that’s close to Dani Akel’s heart. “The unit caught my attention,” he said. “I read their Telegram and saw that they present themselves correctly; they think the right way. I liked that it was about democracy.”

Akel joined the legion in the winter of 2023. He had a lot to learn, he told Meduza; the skills he had gained during his time in the Russian army proved insufficient for participation in a real war.

When he completed his training, Akel was deployed with the legion’s 1st Mechanized Battalion as a gunner. He chose “Apostle” as his callsign. His commander described him as follows:

“The first time you go into battle is sweeter than the first time you have sex. Seriously, I recommend trying it,” Akel wrote on Instagram in early June 2023. An attached picture shows him in a military uniform holding a machine gun.

In May and June, the legion combined forces with another anti-Kremlin group, the Russian Volunteer Corps, to carry out two major raids of Russia’s Belgorod region. During the second one, they temporarily gained control of the village of Novaya Tavolzhanka in the Shebekino district. Ukraine has officially denied having any involvement in the incursions.

Akel told Meduza that during the raid, he felt great pride for his unit. Despite being outnumbered by their opponents, he said, the legion members managed to force them into retreat. “[The Russian soldiers] had armored vehicles, [but] they abandoned their equipment and dropped their weapons. Roughly speaking, they bolted into the forest.”

The raid lasted multiple days before coming to a close on June 6. Later that month, the Russian authorities reported that 14 people had died and 10 had been taken prisoner. Russia also reported that the pro-Ukrainian forces suffered heavy losses, but the formations themselves denied this.

Akel said he has no desire to shoot Russian soldiers. “I’ll never understand what it is that makes a person want to give up his life and attack another country. Things would be much simpler if those guys would just lay down their weapons and refuse to carry out criminal orders,” he said.

For him, every day the war goes on means destroyed homes, ruined lives, and constant deaths, he told Meduza.

“I’ve begun to have a certain anguish, a bitterness, that people are dying. It makes me feel aggressive; I didn’t feel that way before,” he added. “I’d prefer not to see all this, but there’s no escaping it.”

* * *

In late July 2023, the Freedom of Russia Legion swore an oath of allegiance to the people of Russia. Standing in a field of flowers, 33 new recruits repeated in unison: “Glory to Ukraine! Freedom to Russia!” Dani Akel was one of them.

“I love this country,” Akel told Meduza, referring to Russia. “I'd like to see it become a prosperous country that’s home to happy people who aspire to create. Does that make me a patriot, or not?”

According to the Russian Legal Information Agency (RAPSI), at least 20 criminal cases have already been opened against members of the Freedom of Russia Legion, including for state treason, terrorism, and sabotage. They’re also at risk of prosecution for forming a terrorist group, which is punishable by life in prison.

Dani Akel insists that he’s fighting not against his own compatriots but against the state that’s “destroying” their lives. His relatives still live in Russia.

“I was put in what was effectively a hopeless situation. I want to go home, I want to return, but I can’t,” he told Meduza. “I’m not ready to sit around for 30 years, waiting for the situation to be resolved in some non-violent way, just to enter the country on the shoulders of others and organize elections for my own sake.”

As for his own future, Akel said he’s chosen his purpose: he sees himself as a person who stands for “defending goodness”: