Sanity Prevails, After All!

"I felt kind of heartbroken. But I was trying to also stay positive, because it was my husband's ceremony still, and so I didn't want to ruin the day for him." 

"That was pretty scary, because that's when I realized that there is actually a risk that I might get deported -- that I might actually end up in a Russian jail."

"People who end up there for political reasons often don't survive it."

Maria Kartasheva, pro-democracy activist, Russian refugee in Canada

Kartasheva, pictured here earlier in January, had her application for Canadian citizenship held up due to a conviction under a Russian law that has been used against critics of the Ukraine invasion. (Matthew Kupfer/CBC)

 

As a result of rising authoritarianism in Russia, Maria Kartasheva and her husband made the difficult decision to leave the country of their birth and citizenship and apply for a visa to emigrate to Canada. That was in 2019. She now works in Ottawa as a tech  operator. While living in Ottawa she also co-founded a grassroots activist group to work toward changing the political landscape in her home country, to bring democracy to Russia.

In 2022 Maria Kartasheva was informed by her family living in Russia that she had been charged by Russian authorities with the wartime offence of disseminating "deliberately false information" about the Russian military, relating to two blog posts that the 30-year-old had composed while living as a landed immigrant in Canada. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, Vladimir Putin had new wartime laws passed making it a crime against the state to criticize his 'special military operation' by naming it a war. 

Since then, internal and external critics of the conflict, including any who criticize Vladimir Putin or the Russian military for its actions in Ukraine, have been charged with offences against state security, and Maria Kartasheva was one of them, among countless others. Ms. Kartasheva dutifully lost no time in notifying Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, alerting them to the charges while uploading translated court documents. 

 

Soon afterward the department issued an invitation to her citizenship ceremony. When she logged into the ceremony along with her husband in June of 2023, they were asked the routine question whether either had ever been criminally charged; part of a list of standard questions, posed by the pre-interviews taking place before being permitted into the ceremony chamber.

 

At that juncture she explained what had occurred and to her surprise an official reacted by separating her from the ceremony, her husband permitted to proceed with his citizenship. Finally, a month ago, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada sent her a letter, that her conviction in Russia aligns with a Criminal Code offence in Canada relating to providing false information -- in which case citizenship can be denied, or even long afterward on discovery, revoked.

 

She is now awaiting a response to having subsequently submitted an explanation. With the explanation of what occurred to her to burden her with a 'criminal record' in Russia, she requests the department to reconsider their decision to block her from citizenship. Clearly, the official who made that decision to set her citizenship application aside, was not in full possession of the facts. 

 

The facts being that Canada has condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, has committed along with other NATO countries to sanction Russia, yet its officials make these egregious, counterintuitive decisions. 

Finally the matter was resolved with the intervention of Immigration Minister Marc Miller. Today, the minister wrote in a social media post that Kartasheva "will not face deportation and has been invited to become a Canadian citizen."

"Canada's citizenship eligibility rules are designed to catch criminals, not to suppress or punish legitimate political dissent." 

 

Russian antiwar activist Maria Kartasheva has now been granted Canadian citizenship, after she was pulled from a previous ceremony because of a conviction in Russia. Kartasheva was convicted under a Russian law which prohibits "public dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation."  CBCNews