A Stark Rise in Anti-Government Activists Deported Back to Russia From the EU and US

Over the past year, the BBC reports, there has been a stark rise in anti-government activists deported to Russia from the EU and the US — countries where those activists had been seeking refuge. That sentence contains its own inversion. Refuge is the promise that the country you fled will not be the country you are returned to, and the people being sent back are, by the report's description, the ones who opposed the government now receiving them. Deportation is also an ordinary administrative act, which is what makes the pattern worth watching: it does not require anyone to decide that a particular activist deserves to be handed over. It only requires that the paperwork run its course, in the direction opposite to the one the people on it were travelling.