Racial and ethnic profiling by the Moscow police is a problem so old that it’s simply not news. But rarely do you catch police acknowledging it on camera.
Alexander Kim did just that. Kim told me that he was walking through an underground passage in southern Moscow on 20 July when he saw several police officers holding a batch of passports, with a number of men who looked Central Asian standing nearby. Kim started recording with his phone and asked the police why they confiscated the passports. The police responded, “and who are you?”
I watched Kim’s video, which shows police asking to see Kim’s identity papers. When asked why, an officer referred to an alleged, ongoing “Special Operation--‘Illegal,”, and said that based on Kim’s looks, he thought Kim “might not be a Russian citizen.” When Kim asked why they didn’t check other passers-by, the officer replied, “because you look Asian.”
