Lev Mikheev, a Belarusian citizen detained on the morning of September 25 in Georgia, has been taken to the border with Armenia and is currently on the Armenian side, the outlet Pozirk reports. He was also detained upon entering Armenia, as he is on a wanted list at the request of Belarusian authorities. Mikheev, a political refugee who had been awaiting asylum since 2021, shared these details with journalists.
“Today, I tried to complete the standard procedure for renewing my ID card. I had planned ahead and started the process almost a month early. I went to the Migration Department [in the village of Martkopi, about 30 km from Tbilisi] and submitted an application. They accepted it along with my photo and told me to return in two weeks for the decision, as had always been the routine,” Mikheev said.
When two weeks had passed, he returned, but officers told him he had to go to Tbilisi with them for an interview: “They put me in a car immediately. I only had time to send a short message to [human rights activist] Roman [Kislyak] before they confiscated my phone. From that point on, I was treated virtually as an inmate.”
According to Mikheev, his case manager in Tbilisi claimed he was an undocumented migrant and stated that his valid ID card “meant nothing.” The activist was given two options: to be “thrown out of Georgia in handcuffs” or to leave voluntarily, choosing his destination himself—even Belarus. He refused to return to his home country, noting that he had “applied for asylum specifically due to persecution back home.”
The activist asked for some time, at least until his temporary identity certificate expired on October 9, but Georgian law enforcement officials refused.
“They shuttled me from office to office. A doctor came in and stripped me down to my underwear—it was horrifying. Then we drove to my home, I collected a few belongings, and we went back to the department. After that, they transported me here [to the border] in a police van and dumped me.”
According to Mikheev, he chose Armenia himself. Pozirk reports that there was no court hearing regarding his deportation, and he was “forced to sign numerous documents” in Georgian, the contents of which he did not understand. “I realized they were simply out of control here. Trying to argue with them about anything was pointless. So let it be Armenia. And the machinery started turning.”
At the Armenian border, Mikheev was detained because his name appears in the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) interstate wanted database at the request of Minsk. Pozirk notes that Yerevan, having adopted a course of rapprochement with the European Union, does not extradite individuals facing politically motivated prosecution.
Belarusian human rights activist Roman Kislyak, who lives in Georgia and has spent several years attempting to obtain international protection himself, told the outlet that he spent the entire day trying to determine Mikheev’s whereabouts through Georgian authorities. He initially contacted the Migration Department, and when they refused to disclose information, he turned to the police.
“I called 112, the general emergency line, and reported a missing person. Criminal police called me back, requested his documents, and launched a search. It is possible that this only sped up his deportation, because at that very moment they began moving him from cell to cell. We had no way of knowing this,” Kislyak said.
“While we were searching for Lev, he was held incommunicado, cut off from the outside world. This was, in effect, an enforced disappearance. It was not prolonged, but he was stripped entirely of his rights. He was denied any opportunity to contact legal counsel or receive due process, and he was forcibly deported,” the rights advocate emphasized.
According to Kislyak, it has only now emerged that an appellate court had issued a ruling regarding Mikheev back in July, potentially a deportation order.
“We have not seen these rulings, and we will certainly look into all of this. Unfortunately, Georgia is becoming an even more lawless state than it was before,” Kislyak said.
According to Pozirk, Georgian authorities have not granted a single asylum application filed by Belarusian citizens. “In the first half of 2026, 24 Belarusians were expelled from the country. The alleged grounds: overstaying the permitted period of stay (no more than 365 consecutive days), holding an expired passport (which cannot be renewed at an embassy due to Aleksandr Lukashenko’s discriminatory decree of September 4, 2023), or committing an offense,” the outlet writes.