Since 2022 people have been refused bank accounts, turned away from universities, barred from competing and told to leave the countries they live in - not for anything they did, but for being Russian. It is documented, it is current, and the record is still growing. The suspicion behind it did not begin in 2022. The word Russophobia appeared in London in 1836, more than 160 years before Vladimir Putin took office, and Western Europe's fear of Russia has come back in crisis after crisis since. Pomnym (Russian: pomnim, "we remember") keeps the record while it happens. Each entry is dated, sourced to the original reporting and set against that long history, so that whoever reads this later knows what was said and done, and how it felt at the time.
The evidence
Documented cases, official findings and the policies around them.
- Sparkasse KölnBonn restricted about 2,000 accounts of Russian and Belarusian nationals ·Cologne, Germany
- CAS finds FIS ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes by nationality discriminatory ·Lausanne, Switzerland
- Latvia's migration office asked 841 Russian citizens to leave by 13 October 2025 ·Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs (PMLP), Latvia
A history older than Putin
A forged plan of European domination, attributed to Peter the Great, was republished, the historian Orlando Figes records, on the eve of every war involving Russia on the continent: in 1854, 1878, 1914 and 1941. Russia's relations with Western Europe have moved through confrontation, alliance and rapprochement, and the fear has risen and fallen with them. It is neither timeless nor unchanging, but it is far older than Vladimir Putin. Pomnym examines how political conflict can turn into collective suspicion of Russian people, and preserves contemporary cases alongside that history. The record also includes openings and reversals: without them, a chronology becomes a slogan.
Why Pomnym
Pomnym means "we remember". The name is a warning as much as a promise. Much of what this archive records happened to people who had no reason to expect it - who had let their own history go, and so did not recognize the shape of it coming back. Remembering is not nostalgia and not grievance. It is the one thing that makes a repetition recognizable while there is still time to refuse it. That is what this archive is for: not to be read once, but to be there later, dated and checkable, when someone says it never happened.
Purpose
To put Russophobia on the record: a checkable account that helps stop exclusion by nationality from becoming ordinary, and tests every promise of equal treatment against practice.
Records
Each entry sets out a single case: what happened, when, where, and who reported it. Nothing is here on the strength of a rumor. Where an account is disputed, or a decision was later reversed, the entry says so - because a record that only kept the grievances it liked would be worth nothing. Read them together and the pattern is hard to miss.
- Lithuania brigade: several Bundeswehr soldiers with family ties to Russia or Belarus reportedly rejected
- Thirty years of German polls on Russia, and almost none about Russians
- Croatia refused visas to nine of Russia's gymnastics delegation, then issued four
- Assaults on Russian citizens in Germany since 2012: highest in 2024, pre-war peak in 2014
- Sparkasse KölnBonn restricted about 2,000 accounts of Russian and Belarusian nationals
Act
Pomnym recommends against buying a new car from any German carmaker. The recommendation is aimed at an industry for its documented conduct - fraud, bribery and military supply - not at Germans as a people.
Status
The archive is open and growing. So far its Records come mostly from Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Each entry is a documented case, dated and sourced to the original reporting, and the procedure for submitting material is being set up.