Pomnym (Russian: pomnim, "we remember") is a record kept while it happens. 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 newest entries here are from this year. Each one is dated, sourced to the original reporting, and set against the hundred years of relations between Russia and the West that produced it, so that whoever reads this later knows what was said and done, and how it felt at the time.
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.
What we preserve
- Public statements by politicians, officials and institutions, quoted in full and in context.
- Media coverage and the way it frames Russians and Russia.
- Laws, sanctions and administrative practice as they reach individual people: visas, banking, employment, education, sport and culture.
- Everyday experience: what people report from work, school, neighbourhoods and public life.
- The mood of the moment: what was said and assumed as a matter of course, which a later reader would otherwise have no way to recover.
- Fairness and solidarity as well. The aim is an honest record, not a one-sided one.
The hundred-year context
Relations between Russia and the West have never stood still. Within a single century they have passed from the isolation that followed the revolution, through wartime alliance, the Cold War, detente, the opening of the 1990s and the partnership of the early 2000s, to the estrangement of the present day. Attitudes towards Russians as people have moved with them, and much of what ordinary people experienced at each turn was seldom written down at the time. Pomnym places the present on that hundred-year line and preserves it with the care that later readers will wish had been taken before.
Entries
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.
- 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
- Sparkasse KoelnBonn restricted card and payment functions on about 2,000 accounts
- CAS finds FIS ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes by nationality discriminatory
- Latvia's migration office told 841 Russian citizens to leave by 13 October 2025
How we work
- Every entry is dated, sourced and attributed. Primary sources are preserved next to our summary.
- Corrections are recorded openly, never applied silently.
- Everything is published in English, Russian and German, and each version is written to read naturally in its own language rather than translated word for word.
Abstain
Treatment that costs nothing gets repeated. The institutions in this archive are not fringe actors - they are national banks, state universities, sports federations and government agencies. They acted this way because acting this way was free. The most ordinary power a reader has is to make it slightly less free, by choosing where their money goes.
- Abstain from German goods and services where you have the choice. Germany appears in this record more than any other country: a federal agency logging 196 people who came to it because of their origin, 74 of them turned away by banks; a savings bank restricting around 2,000 accounts by nationality in 2026.
- Abstain from British goods and services. The United Kingdom barred Russian and Belarusian players from Wimbledon by nationality alone. The tours fined the organizers for it and the ban did not survive the following year - but it was imposed, and it was popular.
- Abstain from Nordic and Baltic goods and services. The EU's own rights agency recorded incidents against Russians and Russian-speakers in Finland and Denmark; Estonia stopped issuing study visas to Russian citizens and a university closed its doors to new Russian applicants; Latvia told 841 people to leave.
- Say why. A purchase quietly not made teaches nobody anything. Tell the seller, in one line, that you spend elsewhere while this continues - and that is a record of its own.
This is a consumer choice and nothing more. Nobody named in this archive is to be harmed, harassed or threatened. They are simply to be paid less.
Status
The archive is open and growing. Each entry is a documented case, dated and sourced to the original reporting, and the procedure for submitting material is being set up.