By Galina Korol | 2025-03-10

KYIV -- A move that authorities say aims to enhance security in St. Petersburg threatens to unjustly single out ethnic minorities as subjects of state monitoring, human rights activists warn.

St. Petersburg authorities have earmarked about 40 million RUB (€423,751) to develop a video surveillance system that will allegedly be able to identify race and skin color, iStories reported February 20, citing Oleg Kapitanov, chairman of the city's interethnic relations committee.

As part of St. Petersburg's "Safe City" program, officials plan to equip 8,000 of the existing 102,000 cameras with facial recognition technology that can recognize "ethnicity."

The new technology should help "combat the formation of migrant enclaves" and "prevent social tension," said Kapitanov.

Only 43.5% of St. Petersburg residents characterize interethnic relations as good, rather than the 62.5% the authorities hoped to see, he said.

Kapitanov partly attributed the discord to the terrorist attack on March 22, 2024, when gunmen opened fire at the Crocus City Hall, a music venue in Moscow, and set it on fire.

The attack killed 144 people, including five children. The "Islamic State" (IS) claimed responsibility even though the Kremlin tried to pin it on Ukraine.

'Problem of migrants'

Mikhail Romanov, a member of the State Duma from the United Russia party, supported the initiative touted by Kapitanov.

In a speech, Romanov referred to the "problem of migrants making deliveries on e-bikes" and allegedly knocking down pedestrians on the sidewalks.

Kommersant reported February 20 that it had confirmed that as part of the development of the Safe City system, the St. Petersburg government had purchased software to recognize individuals' "ethnicity."

The city acquired the software license in late 2024.

"The functionality will help to anticipate more accurately what resources are needed to guarantee order and safety during large-scale events and to optimize the involvement of volunteers and law enforcement officers who speak different languages," Kommersant wrote.

Last September Aleksandr Gorovoy, first deputy interior minister, said that almost 6.2 million foreign citizens live in Russia and that the largest communities come from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, Kommersant reported.

At the time, the Interior Ministry (MVD) estimated that Russia had 630,000 undocumented migrants.

'The yellow star'

The initiative will not achieve results and will be another waste of public funds, predicted Mikhail Klimarev, a specialist on internet security and executive managing director of the Internet Protection Society.

"I don't really understand how they're going to distinguish ethnic features," Klimarev, a former Russian activist who now lives in Germany, told iStories.

"You can configure a neural network perhaps to recognize articles of clothing, like a paranja or headscarves. Otherwise, you'll need to literally measure skulls."

"This is either useless hype or someone went crazy on the topic of racial superiority," he said.

"In a multiethnic country, introducing these kinds of 'ethnic measures' is at best strange, but it corresponds to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's policies," Alexandra Garmazhapova, president of the Free Buryatia Foundation, told Kontur.

"They may as well ask everyone to wear yellow stars," she added, referring to the distinguishing symbol that the Nazis forced Jews to wear.

Symbolic "yellow stars" are already operating in practice, said Valentina Chupik, a lawyer who has been offering pro bono assistance to migrants for many years and now lives in the United States.

"I'm referring to coercing migrants to get a document that supposedly serves the identification purpose of an internal passport," she told Kontur, noting that the documents are not yet mandatory.

"Every migrant will be required to have a document issued by the Russian MVD that states his [or her] last name, first name, patronymic, date of birth and citizenship, and has a barcode that will link to a database that supposedly contains all information about them," Chupik said.

"Because it's issuing that document, the government isn't going to issue other documents to migrants such as a work permit or migration registration for the place of residence."

Such measures create additional hardship for migrants, especially taking into account bureaucratic hurdles and potential corruption during processing of documents, say observers.

The practice could enable a police officer to state that someone is undocumented, while that person will be unable to prove otherwise.

"Because the police officer has access to that database while the [migrant] doesn't," Chupik said.

'Racist discrimination'

St. Petersburg authorities are actually legalizing a system of ethnic monitoring, which will further encourage "racist discrimination," Chupik said.

Under the pretext of combating the formation of migrant enclaves, the authorities are creating a mechanism that will help single out individuals based on skin color and other racial features.

"This isn't a little savage. This is outright savagery," said Chupik.

Initiatives like these could compound the violations of the rights of workers who go to Russia to eke out extra money, observers say.

"I don't understand this sort of harassment when the [Russian] economy needs low-paid labor," said Jurabek Amonov, a blogger and rights activist from Uzbekistan who founded SYNYACH.UZ.

"And according to the new decree, the police have ... been given the right to deport without due process, and that will set off a wave of corruption," he told Kontur.

Amonov has personal experience with how "Putin's machine" works. Russia deported him even though he had all necessary documents and permits, he said.

"When the war started [against Ukraine in February 2022], I made a lot of video appeals to migrants so they wouldn't join the war," he said. "Apparently someone didn't like that, and even though all my documents had been registered officially and I could legally stay in Russia for a year, I was deported."

Russian propaganda cannot exist without an "imaginary enemy" who always needs to be denounced, Chupik said.

To accomplish this goal, the authorities are willing to sacrifice cheap labor even though the Russian economy has long been suffering from a catastrophic shortage of such workers, she said.

"The government needs a convenient, easily defeated enemy who is clearly visible and clearly an outsider," she said. "Naturally, this person's appearance is what makes them an obvious outsider."