nothing to push the boundaries of its interpretation. They extended the Mskhiladze judgment to pursue broader projects of securing human rights to liberty and freedom from detention for all noncitizens and de facto stateless persons in precarious legal situations in Russia. One lawyer argued passionately: Should Mskhiladze be applied only to stateless persons or can it be extended to all detainees whom it is impossible to deport? I say it extends to all! My practice showed this time and time again, Mskhiladze works not only for stateless persons but also Ukrainian citizens whom it is impossible to deport, and other foreign citizens. Another noted: It boils down to what a detention centre should be… In my opinion, it should be a place where people stay days, not months and years. With stateless persons, or when the receiving country does not take jurisdictional responsibility – what is the point of keeping a person like in prison [v nevole]? The case of Mr Mskhiladze has effectively become a catalyst, a critical juncture that exposed the limits of Russian immigration law but also challenged those limits with wide ranging repercussions for other not necessarily stateless noncitizens. This ruling therefore ‘opened the door for release from detention of not only stateless persons, but all migrants who spend more than three months in detention centres and de facto can be considered stateless persons’ (Tseytlina, 2018: 37). According to the statistics of the ‘Migration and Law’ network, between 2017-2018, over 100 cases were filed with courts all over Russia to have these noncitizens, de facto stateless persons, released from detention due to the impossibility of deporting them (Burtina, 2018b). The lawyers were successful in over 60 per cent of these cases – the appeals courts overturned the earlier decisions by excluding the deportation and ordering the defendants to be released from detention (Burtina, 2018b). 16