(TibetanReview.net, Apr17’26) – Russia, whose war of aggression against Ukraine is said to be sustained by China’s help, has caused the cancellation of a Buddhist festival in capital Moscow after it deported on Apr 8 a group of Tibetan monks from India, accusing them of conducting “unauthorized missionary work”.
Moscow police on Apr 6 raided a Buddhist festival at the Rassvet cultural hub in the city center, detaining several participants and organizers, Russian media reported themoscowtimes.com Apr 16.
The Buddhist Festival of Good Fortune was scheduled to take place over Apr 4-15 in Moscow, but its organizer, the Nalanda Foundation, has said Apr 12 that the event would not go on following the raid.
“We think it would be inappropriate to continue the festival in the absence of its main participants, the monks of the Gyudmed Tantric Monastery,” Nalanda has said on Vkontakte, a Russian social media and networking platform similar to Facebook, widely used in Russia and Eastern Europe.
The organizers have said the monks entered Russia on religious visas and their documents “were processed in compliance with all required procedures.” Nevertheless, law enforcement have said they were being deported because they had not obtained a special license to hold a religious event at a secular venue.
The group of Tibetan monks from India was only to lead group worship and create mandalas, with nothing remotely resembling a missionary work being on planned.
“Offending Buddhists, especially on such a flimsy pretext, is a measure of last resort. They [authorities] are ignorant people, and there’s nothing we can do to help them,” Dina Kozhukhova has written under Nalanda’s VKontakte post.
The report said that while dozens took to social media to decry the abrupt closure of a popular festival, the news hit especially hard in the Buddhist-majority republic of Kalmykia in southern Russia.
The report noted that before Nalanda announced the monks’ deportation, several media outlets offered an alternative reason for the festival’s shutdown: the organizers’ decision to sell a book by Telo Tulku Rinpoche, the former Supreme Lama of Kalmykia who was forced to resign in 2023 after being labelled a “foreign agent” for criticizing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Around 1% of Russia’s population identifies as Buddhist, according to an Oct 2025 survey by the Levada Center, the country’s last major independent pollster. Most of them live in the Siberian republics of Buryatia and Tyva, as well as in Kalmykia, where Buddhism is the traditional religion of local Indigenous communities, the report said.