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25-year-old developer Alexander Kachkurkin was deported from Kazakhstan to Russia, where he was detained directly on the plane, reports “First Department.”
The human rights project states that Kachkurkin is a citizen of Ukraine. He was born and raised in Crimea, and after the occupation of Crimea in 2014, Russian citizenship was imposed on him. For political reasons, he decided to move to Kazakhstan. According to acquaintances, before his detention, Kachkurkin worked on several projects, including collaborating with OpenAI, which was developing GPT language models.
Recently, two administrative charges were filed against the developer: for crossing the road in an undesignated area and for smoking a hookah in an enclosed space. “First Department” insists that both charges were fabricated. On this basis, the police demanded in court that Kachkurkin be deported, accusing him of “disrespect for the laws and sovereignty of the Republic of Kazakhstan” and citing the need to “prevent and restrict offences.”
After the deportation order was issued, the developer was urgently deported to Russia. Human rights defenders note that this procedure usually takes weeks or months, but in Kachkurkin’s case, it took only a few hours.
After arriving in Russia, security forces detained the developer on the plane and took him to court, which placed him in a pre-trial detention centre on charges of high treason (Article 275 of the Criminal Code). The case was reportedly triggered by certain transfers to Ukraine.