18.08.26, Ran Shimoni, Haaretz
Nikolai was taken from his workplace after police told him they had ‘just a few questions.’ Within hours he was told he would be deported. After Israel sought to withdraw the case, the Supreme Court said the authorities’ conduct raises questions
For hours, Nikolai had no idea why he had been arrested. In the middle of a shift at a Tel Aviv restaurant, his manager called him out of the kitchen with an unusual message: the police were looking for him. Outside the restaurants, two policemen were waiting and ordered him to get into a police car.
“It’s all right,” they said, soothingly, “we just have a few questions.”
Minutes later, he was placed in handcuffs, transferred from a Tel Aviv police station to a Population and Immigration Authority facility in Lod, where he received a brief hearing. Once it was done, his residence visa was revoked without further explanation, and he was sent to Givon prison.
Nikolai, 23, came to Israel from Ukraine in November 2025. In Kyiv, he used to work for a couple of years as a producer at the Freedom public broadcasting network, and later worked as a cook, a profession he pursued in Israel, too.
Throughout the process, police officers declined to explain why he had been arrested or what he was suspected of.
It was not until the next day, at a hearing at the Custody Court, that he first heard the suspicion against him: contact with “enemies of Israel.”
“Until that moment, I didn’t even know why I was there,” he told Haaretz. “I told them I wasn’t in contact with anybody, that I don’t understand why I’ve been arrested and that I asked to know more details.”
He arrived in Israel following his half-siblings, Jewish citizens who have been living here. At first, he used to live with his sister in Bat Yam, later moved into a Tel Aviv apartment with his brother. Life, he thought to himself after six months, was beginning to fall into place.
Nikolai was arrested on April 29. What began as a typical restaurant shift ended at the immigration authority’s enforcement facility in Lod. Throughout the evening, he was never interrogated. While at the immigration facility, he was repeatedly asked about “enemies of Israel,” but was not presented with a single piece of evidence.
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“I kept trying to figure out why I was under arrest, and nobody would answer me,” he says.
The hearing given him, he adds, was brief and confusing. Time and again, he was asked, through an interpreter, if he was in contact with “enemies of Israel.”
“I told him I have no contacts, that I never talked to any such people,” he says. “On the third time they asked me, I said that I considered Iran and Russia to be two dictatorships and that Israel, like Ukraine, is fighting for its independence.”
His explanations, however, were to no avail.
Without being confronted with evidence and without any follow-up questions, it was decided to revoke his visa and transfer him to the Givon prison. On the ride there, Nikolai was told he was going to be deported and that his relatives, too, would be banned from entering Israel.
He remembers the first few days at Givon prison mainly as a sense of shock. “I was under a lot of stress, I couldn’t believe I was in such a situation,” he says. Only on the next hearing, at the Custody Court, did Nikolai finally realize what was written about him in the police report.
According to documents filed with the court, the decision to revoke Nikolai’s visa and the restraining order issued against him were based on a “document from a security source” that claimed he was in contact with “enemies of Israel,” though he was not presented with the actual file.
“This was the first time I realized what I was under arrest for,” he says.
At the end of the hearing, Nikolai was told he would be deported unless he retained a private attorney to appeal the decision. He says that after being returned to his cell, an official warned him that hiring a lawyer would not help and would only result in significant legal expenses.
Despite the warning, his family secured legal representation by attorneys Idan Moldavsky and Alex Zernopolsky. Just days before Nikolai’s release, the state was still seeking to extend his detention by another week. It later informed the court, however, that it was no longer pursuing his removal from Israel and requested that the proceedings be dismissed.
Nikolai was held at Givon for almost a month. Over this period, his lawyers filed appeals with the court and even petitioned Israel’s High Court against the authority’s decision, until it changed its own mind, asking for the petition to be struck out.
Supreme Court Justice Khaled Kabub called the authorities’ actions “questionable,” ordering the immigration authority to file a proper affidavit about the chain of events.”
Nikolai’s attorneys told Haaretz that the case “illustrates a troubling practice, in which immigration and custody proceedings are being used against refugees and asylum seekers instead of the usual criminal procedure, also in cases when a person was not even interrogated, presented with any evidence or indicted.”
Nikolai’s attorneys said that “the inherent vulnerability of anyone who is under temporary protection in Israel allows authorities to hold them in custody for a long time, even without proper criminal proceedings.”
Zernopolsky, who is also an honorary consul of Ukraine in Israel, said that “Israel is a lawful country, which is exactly why cases of such blatant arbitrariness, where a person finds himself under arrest without any proper review of the basis for detaining him, must be met with an immediate, firm response.”
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Israel has granted Ukrainian nationals residing in the country “temporary protection” status, under which the state refrains from deporting them and periodically extends their residency visas.
The status, however, does not recognize Ukrainians as refugees or grant them any permanent legal rights, leaving them dependent on temporary visa extensions and the evolving policies of the Population and Immigration Authority.
In March, the authority announced that the visas would be extended through June 30, or until the end of the war in Ukraine, whichever comes first.
“I still don’t understand why they came for me,” Nikolai says. “I’ve no criminal record, I had all the documents, and they still put me in jail.”
In a comment, the Population Authority said that when information is received about a foreign national that warrants review, the case is examined on its merits. In Nikolai’s case, the authority said, the information required investigation, but once it determined there was no basis for further action, he was released.
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