Diplomatic efforts between the Philippines and Russia have secured the release of 24 Filipino citizens held without charges for nine months in a Siberian city, Philippine government officials confirmed in an official statement released Saturday. The breakthrough came just days after Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. personally brought up the case of the detained Filipinos during a bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of a landmark ASEAN-Russia summit in Kazan.
As the current rotating chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Marcos traveled to Kazan this week to lead the 11-nation bloc’s commemorations marking 35 years of formal diplomatic relations between ASEAN and Russia. It was on the sidelines of this anniversary summit that the Philippine leader held his one-on-one talks with Putin, where the detained Filipinos topped the bilateral agenda.
Philippine foreign affairs officials confirmed that all 24 detainees are set to arrive in Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport on two separate flights in the early hours of Sunday. The first group of returnees will be greeted on arrival by Foreign Secretary Theresa Lazaro, who accompanied Marcos to the Kazan summit and was part of the bilateral talks with the Russian delegation.
The 24 Filipinos had been held in detention in Irkutsk, a city in southeastern Siberia, for roughly nine months without any formal criminal charges filed against them. Marcos told reporters after his meeting with Putin that Manila had little to no official information about the detainees’ circumstances before the diplomatic intervention. Initial local reports suggest the Filipinos were likely victims of transnational illegal job recruitment rings, and were taken into custody by Russian authorities over suspected immigration violations.
What makes the rapid resolution of the case notable is the complex diplomatic context between the two nations. The Philippines is a long-standing key treaty ally of the United States in the Indo-Pacific, and was among the majority of ASEAN member states that supported a 2022 United Nations General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. To date, Singapore remains the only ASEAN member to have imposed formal economic sanctions on Russia over the Ukraine conflict, whose prime minister Lawrence Wong also attended the Kazan summit.
Marcos recounted that when he raised the detention issue, Putin responded that he had not been previously aware of the case but immediately committed to ordering an urgent review. By their working dinner on the same day of the meeting, Putin told Marcos that no criminal wrongdoing had been proven against the 24 Filipinos, and reassured his counterpart: “Don’t worry, we will find a way to fix this problem.”
Within days of that conversation, Russian official notified the Philippine delegation that the detainees would be processed for immediate deportation back to the Philippines. According to Igor Bailen, the Philippine ambassador to Moscow, roughly 15,000 Filipino citizens currently reside and work across the Russian Federation.