‘Nothing good will come of this’ Three years into the full-scale war, Russia’s exiled opposition is in crisis — leaving anti-war Russians feeling disillusioned and unrepresented
Russia’s political opposition, suffocated more and more each year by the Putin regime, has long been fragmented and plagued by infighting. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kremlin repression escalated to new extremes, making survival nearly impossible for independent political voices inside the country. As a result, the opposition’s most prominent figures now live abroad, making it increasingly difficult for them to shake accusations that they’re out of touch with those they claim to represent. The 2024 death of Alexey Navalny, widely regarded as the leader of Russia’s pro-democracy opposition, along with a wave of both physical and rhetorical attacks between opposition factions, has left many anti-war Russians feeling helpless, exhausted, and unrepresented. Meduza special correspondent Lilia Yapparova spoke with activists, politicians, and ordinary Russians who oppose the Putin regime to understand how the movement reached this point — and where its future lies.
On December 6, 2023, Maxim (name changed) returned from work to his home in St. Petersburg, had dinner, and waited for midnight. He had no plans to sleep; he needed to see for himself what two new billboards, rented by a recently registered company, would look like when they went up.
Maxim ended up spending several hours parked near the billboard. To keep himself from dozing off in his car, he drank coffee and watched videos from political scientist and YouTube phenomenon Ekaterina Schulmann. When workers finally arrived and put up a blue banner with a QR code and the words “Russia: Happy New Year,” Maxim smirked.
By the morning of December 7 — exactly 100 days before Russia’s presidential election — the billboards had made the news. In a stunt organized by then-imprisoned opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), the QR codes, which initially led to a New Year’s sweepstakes page, had begun redirecting users to a site urging people to vote for anyone but Vladimir Putin. But despite the attention, Maxim, then the coordinator of the FBK’s “underground office” in St. Petersburg, felt little satisfaction.
“A banner won’t defeat Putin or stop the war,” the activist tells Meduza. “You can’t shake the feeling that we don’t have much influence. Maybe if the system at least seemed unstable — but no, Mr. Putin’s rule has turned out to be very, very solid. And there’s no sign of it cracking.”
A few hours later, in the afternoon of December 7, workers tore down the FBK banners under police supervision. In the year since the campaign, Maxim’s doubts about the prospects of anti-Putin resistance have only deepened — especially in light of the high-profile infighting that’s rocked the Russian opposition abroad.
“I have no idea why [Maxim] Katz went after the FBK. And why [former Yukos executive Leonid] Nevzlin allegedly ordered someone to beat [Navalny ally] Leonid [Volkov] with a hammer, like some kind of 1990s mafia throwback,” he tells Meduza.
Honestly, with an opposition like this… We’d be better off if they didn’t exist at all. They’ve completely lost sight of who the real enemy is. Now is hardly the time to squabble over who worked with whom, who signed letters defending whom, or which banker was just a figurehead. But Khodorkovsky, Katz, and the FBK seem dead set on deciding in advance who gets to call themselves the opposition.
Since Navalny’s death, anti-Putin Russians have felt “like a bunch of helpless kittens,” Maxim concludes.
Now there’s nobody — even from prison — who can write to us and say, ‘Guys, don’t worry, I’m with you.’ But this is what he told us: If I’m gone, your job is to become strong kittens yourselves. And that seems to be exactly what the opposition has failed to do.”
‘So much energy is being wasted’
The infighting among the Russian opposition in 2024 left anti-Putin Russians feeling “drained,” “demoralized,” and “disgusted,” according to independent politicians and activists who spoke to Meduza.
The head of an organization that helps anti-war Russians flee the country tells Meduza that the scandals left him so overwhelmed with depression that he “couldn’t get out of bed for a week.” Journalist Aleksandra Garmazhapova, head of the Free Buryatia Foundation, says she found herself wondering whether she should change careers altogether and become a chocolatier or run a dog shelter.
Political prisoners — “whether they’re Navalny fans or Katz-bots” — mostly just “lose their minds” when they hear secondhand about the opposition’s infighting on Twitter, according to volunteers from the Prison Care Packages project. Darya Serenko, a coordinator for the Feminist Anti-War Resistance who currently lives in Spain, tells Meduza that many Russian activists “prefer to just tune it all out rather than waste what little energy they have left.”
In the fall of 2024, businessman and philanthropist Boris Zimin — a longtime supporter of the FBK — publicly voiced his disappointment in the opposition’s leadership. He openly criticized the FBK’s top figures and condemned the organization’s strategy in recent years. Zimin was particularly harsh about the FBK’s latest projects, including its investigation into Leonid Nevzlin and the documentary series Traitors, which looked back at the history of 1990s Russia. Many viewers, including ones who witnessed the events depicted in the videos, were also unhappy with the series; some even accused its creators of falsifying history.
“I find it deeply frustrating that so much energy is being wasted on fighting for relevance in a space that barely even matters,” Zimin tells Meduza, referring to the FBK’s feud with Mikhail Khodorkovsky and other “oligarchs of the 1990s.” “As much as I want to believe in the Russian opposition, its impact on what’s actually happening — on the war, on the stability of Putin’s regime, on Ukraine’s ability to resist — is next to nothing.”
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Another well-known public figure, businessman and Anti-War Committee member Yevgeny Chichvarkin, announced at the end of 2024 that he wanted to step away from the opposition entirely — at least until its leaders “refocus on the real enemy.” He declined to discuss the situation with Meduza, saying, “It wouldn't be a great look if I puked during an interview, would it? Until the infighting stops, I’m stepping aside. Curling up like Ghandi on a mat and staying put until people come to their senses.”
The only people pretending not to be affected by the scandals are those directly involved. Mikhail Khodorkovsky — a close friend and business partner of Nevzlin — tells Meduza that the conflicts “don’t depress [him] in the slightest.” Politician Maksim Katz is convinced that his high-profile investigation into bankers and the FBK “actually energized [his audience]: people want politics that, if not wealthy, are at least honest.” (FBK representatives declined to comment for this story.)
Most of the people Meduza spoke to see the root cause of these endless conflicts as obvious, and they all put it in nearly the same terms: the Russian opposition is in crisis, and hardly anyone believes its leaders will come to power anytime soon.
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“No one has a real plan for getting Putin out of the Kremlin or stopping the war,” says Sergey Davidis, the head of Memoir’s Support for Political Prisoners program. “So people start looking for someone to blame.” Aleksandra Garmazhapova put it another way: “It’s easier to go after each other than after Putin. People are just lashing out in frustration.”
“People are worn thin. I feel it myself,” says Darya Serenko. “I sometimes scroll through Twitter or Facebook and then feel awful for a whole week. And people on Twitter constantly mock me for suggesting that instead of flinging shit at each other, politicians should try mediation with a professional conflict specialist. But honestly, that’s exactly what happens in diplomatic groups between states. That’s literally how peace treaties get signed.”
‘Dude, you’ve completely lost touch with reality’
For politicians in exile and their supporters still in Russia, mutual understanding is becoming increasingly difficult. These two groups now live in completely different realities, each with its own set of problems. That’s why the infighting among opposition groups abroad seems especially out of place, according to the politicians and activists who spoke to Meduza.
The gap between Russians inside the country and the political émigrés is “enormous — and it’s only going to grow,” says Zhanna Nemtsova, head of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation. Two other civil society figures recalled one of the key protest slogans from late 2011 — a phrase that means both “You don’t represent us” and “You can’t even imagine us.” Back then, the slogan was directed at the Russian State Duma in response to elections marred by blatant fraud. “The unsettling thing,” says Grigory Sverdlov, founder of the project Get Lost, “is that now it’s being said not just about the government, but about the opposition as well.”
“People who stayed in Russia looked to the ones who managed to leave, hoping they would hold on and persevere,” journalist and former Rzhev City Council deputy Ekaterina Duntsova told the independent journalists’ cooperative Bereg. She herself tried to run as an anti-war candidate in the 2024 presidential election and remains in Russia. “And instead, it’s been endless infighting. Of course people are disillusioned,” she said.
Maxim, the man from St. Petersburg who helped the FBK pull off its billboard stunt, also blamed the growing divide on independent media outlets in exile:
Both the opposition and you guys in the media are losing touch with what’s actually happening here in Russia — the atmosphere, the narratives… I wish the opinion leaders who left would get more feedback from inside the country. Because sometimes you watch someone on YouTube and think, “Dude, you’ve completely lost touch with reality — are you sure you’re not the one living in a bunker?”
Lev Shlosberg is one of the few opposition politicians still in Russia who continues to work publicly — despite the fact that he’s now facing criminal charges. Speaking with journalists from the Bereg cooperative, he says he can’t recall a single example of a “politician forced into exile who has managed to maintain a genuine, organic connection with Russian society”:
No form of electronic communication can replace what I would call a “feel for the country.” You can only take the temperature of the hospital if you’re actually inside it. Everything else is just a substitute, an imitation. I understand it — it’s hard to admit that from where you are, you can no longer fully sense the country. But society itself feels very acutely whether someone is truly connected or not.
Shlosberg has repeatedly stated that, in his view, the actions of political exiles “have absolutely nothing to do with the future of the country.” In August 2024, he sparked one of Russia’s most heated political debates in recent memory with a post in which he referred to a “party of foreign blood” hoping to “return to Russia under the cover of foreign tanks.”
Predictably, Shlosberg’s remarks drew sharp criticism from those who had been forced to flee Russia. Economist Konstantin Sonin — sentenced in absentia to eight and a half years for spreading “disinformation” about the army — dismissed the politician’s statements as “bursts of questionable patriotism.” Journalist and activist Sergey Parkhomenko — labeled a “foreign agent” in Russia — called Shlosberg’s statement a “whining appeal” full of “hypocrisy, demagoguery, and cheap populism.”
For many political exiles, “You don’t represent us” is more than just a slogan — it’s a literal truth. While opposition leaders engage with European and American bureaucracies — lobbying for sanctions lists, discussing Russia’s future in the European Parliament, or advocating for Russian refugees in the U.S. — the anti-Putin resistance still lacks a universally recognized structure that could serve as a true representative body for the Russian diaspora and systematically defend its rights.
If such a body existed, it would make life “a lot easier” for organizations like Get Lost, which helps Russians avoid being sent to war, Sverdlov says.
“European politicians need to be regularly approached by the same group, with the same set of demands. We keep telling our politicians this, because E.U. diplomats and European Parliament staff keep telling us the same thing,” a representative of InTransit, another evacuation group, tells Meduza. “Disjointed efforts only make things harder. Foreign ministries complain: first one person comes to us, then another — so who are we supposed to listen to? This one or that one?”
Ilya Shumanov, an anti-corruption expert and the former head of Transparency International – Russia In Exile, sees the same problem:
Western diplomats keep telling me it would be great to have a ‘Russian Tsikhanouskaya’ — a single leader or coalition representing Russians, the way [Sviatlana] Tsikhanouskaya does for Belarusians. But that doesn’t exist yet. Some in the West engage with the FBK, others with Khodorkovsky’s camp. The result? Nobody has real legitimacy — because there’s always an alternative voice claiming otherwise.
‘Change won’t come from abroad’
For the nearly three years since February 24, 2022, practically every discussion about Ukraine among the Russian opposition has sparked painful debates. But one issue stands out as particularly contentious: support for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Many Ukrainian activists demand that anti-war Russians send money to the Ukrainian army. Meanwhile, many anti-war Russians say they’re not willing to finance the killing of their compatriots.
Unsurprisingly, this issue has fueled a series of bitter disputes. In the spring of 2023, Anna Veduta — former press secretary to Alexey Navalny and now director of strategic partnerships at the Free Russia Foundation — waded into one such argument on X (formerly Twitter). She posted a photo of artillery shells, one of which was inscribed with the words: “Your enemy is in the Kremlin, not in Ukraine.” Veduta captioned the image, “Here’s a screenshot of a shell bought with my money — my message to ‘our boys,’ whose support I’m supposedly guilty of withholding.”
Russian state propagandists seized on the post as ammunition against the FBK, and it continues to resurface in online debates as supposed evidence that opposition figures are “funding attacks” on their own country.
What Russians really want is “a healthy patriotic stance,” rather than “loyalty to the West and Ukraine,” former FBK activist Maxim tells Meduza.
They’re pandering to the other side, even though supporters and potential voters actually live here, in Russia. As a Russian citizen, I find it painful that the interests of Ukrainians and of our exiled compatriots are being prioritized over our own. Those of us inside Russia are being cut off — as if we don’t exist. But change won’t come from abroad; it will start here, inside the country.
“After going into exile, part of the Russian opposition started seeing the situation through what I’d call a Ukrainian-Western lens,” political analyst and Re:Russia project director Kirill Rogov tells Meduza. “This perspective assumes Russia shares responsibility for the war along with Putin. It plays well in the West, it’s comfortable — but it gives them zero chance of gaining support inside Russia.”
Whether the two halves of Russia’s civil society — divided by borders — can find common ground remains unclear. Darya Serenko believes that the exiled opposition must provide a platform for “voices from inside Russia.”
At an anti-war rally in Berlin on November 17, 2024 — organized by Alexey Navalny’s widow Yulia, along with former political prisoners Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza — members of the Feminist Anti-War Resistance (FAS) carried signs featuring slogans written by people inside Russia. Each placard credited its author: “Tatyana, 56, Saratov”; “Alina, 28, Balashov”; “Dio, 14, St. Petersburg.”
“As a movement, we asked ourselves: What can this rally offer to people living under dictatorship? People who are cut off from events they care about?” Serenko tells Meduza. “So we collected their words, allowing them to speak out in this way. ‘My voice is being silenced here, but my allies can amplify it.’ It’s about bridging the gap.”
Yulia Navalnaya has tried a similar approach, launching an open call for proposals on reforming Russia’s future — a form that anyone can fill out. The results have yet to be announced.
‘Bloggers with delusions of grandeur’
Ilya Danilov, the former head of Navalny’s Lipetsk office, fondly recalls the early days, long before the full-scale war and the murder of the opposition leader, when he was just starting to film investigative videos.
I had no experience, and the results were pretty amateurish — but it was so much fun! You’d rush in with a camera, start asking questions… I remember when we made one video about the Lipetsk mayor’s offshore accounts that got 100,000 views! Or the time we exposed a school tablet procurement scheme where the prices were inflated tenfold — after that, the district head was actually removed from office. I was really proud of that. People noticed, liked, and shared it. It was a great time.
Today, the videos produced by politicians and bloggers on YouTube are much more polished than what Danilov was filmed, but he hardly watches any of them.
It’s all mass-produced now; you don’t see the same fire in people’s eyes anymore. Because none of us — journalists, politicians — understand anymore what we’re doing or why. No matter how hard we try, our work is barely visible now [due to censorship and government pressure]. Even the audience that’s still with us doesn’t really believe in its impact. Music critics go through this after forty — they start worrying about not writing music themselves… It’s the same with us.
Yet the online political content keeps increasing. With no real way to compete for power or even hold rallies inside the country (protests in Russia are brutally suppressed), opposition figures have shifted their focus to media. They compete with independent news outlets in breaking stories and try to counter state propaganda.
“The opposition has turned into a gathering of bloggers with a million followers and delusions of grandeur,” says Aleksandra Garmazhapova. “It feels like they live in their own world. I remember at an Anti-War Committee meeting in the spring of 2023, people started comparing their YouTube subscriber counts. It was pathetic. We’re all in a sinking boat, in dire straits, and we’re seriously going to argue over who has more followers?”
“Yes, politicians are turning into media outlets,” acknowledges Maxim Katz, who’s still more often referred to as a “blogger” than as a “politician.” “I try not to aim for impossible goals. What’s important is to show Russians that it’s still possible to say things in Russian that go against state propaganda. So that when the time comes and there’s a legal way to re-enter politics, we can quickly form a political party.”
Still, as some activists point out, political bloggers and media outlets rarely set their own agenda. “It’s completely reactive: something happens in Russia, and they respond to it,” says political analyst Ivan Preobrazhensky. (One striking exception is the FBK, which continues to produce both films like “Traitors” and old-school investigations, such as their recent exposé on Rosneft chief Igor Sechin’s salary.)
“Russia has an idea right now — war. And it resonates [with the audience],” says Evgeny Chichvarkin. “The opposition, meanwhile, can only try to sell the idea of freedom, something Russia has never really had — to spark people’s imagination. They need to find the right words and images so that when you close your eyes, you see Disneyland: pink towers stretching skyward, the scent of caramel, and freedom as the ultimate value. But that idea doesn’t exist yet.”
‘Selling their reputations’
Some activists who spoke to Meduza admit that it was only after a series of internal opposition conflicts in 2024 that they began to question how exiled political organizations, human rights projects, and media outlets actually sustain themselves.
One turning point was the FBK’s investigation into the attack on Leonid Volkov, which revealed for the first time that Leonid Nevzlin had been financially supporting a range of contemporary media projects — including the Telegram channels Sota and even Navalny LIVE. Meanwhile, Maxim Katz’s documentary about the bankers sparked a debate over whether political organizations like the FBK should accept funding from businessmen with dubious reputations.
Many Russia-focused political and human rights initiatives are funded not only by private donations and crowdfunding but also with support from the European Union and the United States. Foreign funding is a sensitive issue for most recipients — both in terms of security and reputation — which is why there’s little public information about which organizations receive support and through what channels.
According to Meduza’s sources, one of the key distributors of U.S. funds in recent years has been the Free Russia Foundation (FRF) — a nonprofit founded in the U.S. in 2014 by Russian emigres. The organization provides assistance to political prisoners and refugees and works to “combat propaganda.” In 2019, Russia designated FRF as an “undesirable” organization, and in 2024, the Justice Ministry added it to its list of “extremist organizations.” “They’ve secured a huge number of grants, primarily American ones. And they became a major force for one simple reason — FRF has money,” says a source familiar with the grant distribution system.
At the same time, the Free Russia Foundation has faced sustained attacks from media outlets and bloggers linked to Leonid Nevzlin. According to the investigative outlet Agentstvo Media, pro-Nevzlin platforms have published dozens of critical reports about the organization. Another controversy involved SVTV’s expose on the so-called “elf factory” — a bot farm allegedly run by FRF to flood VKontakte with pro-opposition comments. Some suspect that SVTV — a project that presents itself as a “libertarian media outlet” but frequently targets independent Russian outlets in exile — may have produced the report with Nevzlin’s backing.
In December 2024, FRF head Natalia Arno reported being attacked in London. A man on a scooter allegedly snatched her phone and shouted, “Greetings from Nevzlin!” The incident occurred just minutes after Arno had met with Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Nevzlin declined to comment for this story.
A major blow to Western-funded media organizations — including, it seems, FRF — came in early 2025 when the U.S. government froze aid to Russian civil society groups through USAID. The exact amount previously allocated for Russian initiatives is unknown, and whether European funding can fill the gap remains uncertain.
The suspension of U.S. funding has exposed the deep reliance of exiled Russian civil society on Western support — and, predictably, fueled a wave of schadenfreude over “grant suckers” fighting over dwindling resources. However, financial struggles for the opposition abroad began even before Trump’s election victory. One key driver of what some sarcastically call the “Second Grant War” — the latest round of infighting over funding — was, once again, internal fighting.
“We saw you as human rights advocates, fundamentally different from Putin. But if you’re attacking each other with hammers, it taints everyone,” Memorial’s Sergey Davidis recalls one foreign politician saying in response to the allegations against Nevzlin.
An activist who requested anonymity described a grant-making organization’s confusion in similar terms: “If you’re taking money from people from the 1990s, you have to know that those funds come with baggage, right? How is that not obvious?”
As a result, some grant providers have begun considering the need for stricter due diligence procedures for Russian recipients, former Transparency International Russia-in-Exile head Ilya Shumanov tells Meduza. Meanwhile, Mikhail Khodorkovsky — who himself funds political and media organizations — says that some “democratic projects” have lost grant funding entirely: “They were told, ‘Guys, we’d rather wait and see for now.’ […] People just want to know how this whole situation [with the scandals] will unfold.”
Ksenia Maksimova, founder of the Russian Democratic Society, tells Meduza that donors often “disappear” in the wake of each new “shitstorm at the pasta factory” — her phrase for the scandals among the Russian opposition.
Political analyst Ivan Preobrazhensky says he believes it’s small grassroots initiatives that will suffer the most:
Western bureaucrats will keep working with those they already work with. But now every grassroots initiative will be scrutinized over “questionable sponsors like the FBK’s.” Every past donor will be examined under a magnifying glass: “What if another scandal erupts, like the one around Navalny’s team, and it turns out we gave grants to them too?”
Iskra, an initiative that supports exiled Russians, lost nearly all of its funding after a Twitter controversy in which its founder, Gera Ugryumova, was falsely accused of collaborating with the Federal Security Service (FSB) — even though the funding didn’t come from grants. Ugryumova explained:
After the smear campaign, our anonymous sponsor — who had been donating large sums in crypto, including a one-time transfer of 0.65 bitcoin [about 35,000 euros at the time] — cut us off. Just look at our expense reports for July and August; you can see where the drop happened. In June, we had 12,000 euros at the start of the month — now we’re down to just 160.
As a result, Iskra has temporarily stopped paying salaries, and, according to Ugryumova, the organization has been forced to turn away many exiled Russians in need of assistance.
When it comes to private funding of civil society initiatives, “it’s all about who can cut a deal with whom,” says Zhanna Nemtsova. “This often leads grant providers to try to buy loyalty.” Grigory Sverdlin agreed, saying, “There are people who are practically selling off their own reputation.”
Preobrazhensky was even more blunt: “Russian exile networks and many of their intellectual projects are just patronage systems where everyone is serving someone else’s interests; truly independent people are rare.”
Both Nemtsova and Schumanov believe the funding model for politicians and activists needs to change. “As long as these bad practices continue, they’ll keep fueling scandals — especially the kind that raise the question, ‘Can this opinion be trusted, or is it just a product of financial dependence?’” Nemtsova says. “This has to change now — we need a mechanism for distributing private funds.” She argues that new organizations should emerge to act as intermediaries between donors and projects in need, ensuring funds are distributed transparently.
Shumanov believes that grant recipients themselves also need to be more open:
We need to rethink the idea that “we’re doing good work, so we have to stay secretive for our safety.” Instead, they should disclose more [about their funding sources] to build trust. That’s the most important task for political organizations — because without trust, they can’t function.
‘New people will come’
Anna, a volunteer with the Prison Care Packages project in Russia, says that keeping up with the latest infighting is enough to drive her “a little insane.” She tells Meduza:
Being under constant risk is already tough on your psyche — you live in paranoia, check the peephole before leaving home, never knowing how much time you have left before they come for you. And the scandals… You see them and realize these people aren’t going to help you — you’re on your own. It feels like you’re completely alone, and no one abroad cares what happens to you.
The contrast between the conditions activists face inside Russia and those abroad has only deepened the rift within Russian civil society.
One way to bridge this divide, according to Memorial’s Sergey Davidis, is to “stop talking to people in the language of punishment.” He believes this approach would also help expand the anti-Putin resistance by drawing in “wavering Russians.”
Aleksandra Garmazhapova from the Free Buryatia Foundation agreed: “The opposition mistakenly assumes that people who are hesitant — or even pro-war — are inherently stupid. But ignoring an audience you don’t like doesn’t make it disappear.”
Sociologist Margarita Zavadskaya tells Meduza that keeping messaging relevant to Russians while also maintaining productive ties with the West is a major struggle for exiled opposition figures. “It’s an incredibly difficult balancing act,” she says. “The main challenge isn’t even getting along with each other — it’s staying acceptable to Western partners. They have to carefully stick to a line that Western governments are willing to tolerate.”
But Western governments — despite the ongoing conflicts within the Russian opposition — still seem to expect different political groups to find ways to cooperate, Meduza’s sources say.
According to political analyst Ivan Preobrazhensky, the West has no appetite for a more radical agenda among the Russian opposition: “For instance, nobody wants to fund genuinely anti-war activities, let alone sabotage-based ones. I attended an event in 2023 with European politicians, and the Russian organizers were explicitly told not to use the word ‘struggle’ — ‘We can’t create the impression that we support direct action in Russia.’”
After Mikhail Khodorkovsky expressed support for Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny, Preobrazhensky says, American foundations reportedly told grantees working with Khodorkovsky not to request funding from them anymore. Khodorkovsky confirmed this to Meduza but declined to specify which foundations were involved:
I had a very heated argument about the Prigozhin mutiny at the State Department when they gathered Russia experts. Everyone understands that regime change can only happen through internal splits. But a mature totalitarian regime doesn’t break into ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ — it breaks into ‘bad’ and ‘worse.’ Everyone knows this! And yet, in Washington, the phrase ‘regime change’ is off limits.
That’s why I’ve had such a complicated relationship with parts of the U.S. administration. I told them, ‘Guys, can you just stay out of our business? Just stay out of it. If Putin’s regime is acceptable to you, then don’t get in our way. You hand out money [to the opposition] while forbidding them from even wanting real change in Russia — you’re just distracting people who could be doing something else.
Activists and young politicians who have gone underground have little hope for their own futures. “Many of us won’t live to see the results of our work,” says Daria Serenko. “And that’s a really hard thing to accept — it feels like you’re working in a void, sending your efforts into the abyss.”
About a third of the activists and politicians Meduza spoke to believe that the opposition will simply have to wait for Putin’s autocracy to collapse on its own — and that there’s little they can do to accelerate the process. And when that time comes, few of today’s opposition leaders are likely to play a key role in whatever comes next, says Zhanna Nemtsova:
I understand that people involved in politics today need some kind of dream — something to keep them going. So they tell themselves they’ll be part of a future democratic transition. But transitions aren’t always democratic. Sometimes, it’s just one authoritarian leader replacing another. Even if the next person in power supports democratic values — and maybe we don’t even know their name yet — it’s unlikely they’ll suddenly appoint exiled opposition figures to key positions. They’ll work with people they trust. People they know. And people who are loyal to them.
“The current setup is completely unworkable — whether it’s the one built around the FBK or the one built around Khodorkovsky,” says opposition figure Maxim Katz. “None of them will be able to influence Russian politics, even if the opportunity arises. Maybe while this whole thing collapses, I’ll disappear too. Well, so be it.”
Both political analysts and some activists believe the next generation of opposition leaders will emerge from within Russia. “These will be completely new people — young, not disillusioned, and clear about what they want and what kind of country they aim to build,” says Aleksandra Garmazhapova. “When the Kremlin wall starts to crumble, we’ll see many incredible new faces,” Sverdlin tells Meduza. “In a country so rich in talent, it would be strange to think, ‘If not Putin, then who?’ Or, ‘If not the exiled opposition, then who?’”
“Everything the Russian opposition had done — good and bad — was wiped out on February 24,” says political analyst Ivan Preobrazhensky.
But they’re only just beginning to realize it. All the frantic activity we’re seeing now is just an attempt to resist the inevitable course of history. If they don’t come to terms with the fact that their role now is to support and fundraise for younger organizations and new leaders who have a better grasp of the moment, they’ll end up consigning themselves to irrelevance.
For Sergey Davidis, the bitter infighting among different opposition groups has caused him to lose faith “only in certain individuals” — not in the movement as a whole. “This isn’t the end of the world — new people will come,” he tells Meduza. “Those who are young now and don’t belong to rigid, leader-driven structures feel unrepresented. But that’s only for now.”
One person who feels literally “unrepresented” is 21-year-old Olesya Krivtsova. Born in Russia’s Belgorod region, she started watching Navalny’s videos as a teenager. On January 23, 2021, she attended her first protest in his support. In March 2022, she joined her first anti-war rally. In the early months of the full-scale war, Krivtsova distributed leaflets for the Feminist Anti-War Resistance. Then, on the morning of December 26, 2022, security forces broke down her apartment door.
Krivtsova was charged in two criminal cases over anti-war social media posts and added to the Russian Federal Financial Monitoring Service’s list of “terrorists and extremists.” In March 2023, with the help of the evacuation project Vyvozhuk, she escaped house arrest by walking out of her apartment and cutting off her ankle monitor.
Krivtsova is currently renting an apartment in Kirkenes, Norway. She writes for the local publication The Barents Observer, covering Russia and the war, while studying remotely at Vilnius University. She says she’s “largely distanced” herself from Russian opposition circles: “I just don’t have the energy for it — and I don’t see the point.”
After just brief contact with the previous generation of opposition figures, she lost any desire to work with them. What finally pushed her away wasn’t internal conflicts but harassment from “a prominent figure in the Russian opposition”:
When we met in person, he suddenly started talking to me about sex — a lot — completely unprompted. I just ran away from him. Later, I found out I wasn’t the only person this had happened to.
“I don’t think anyone represents me right now,” Krivtsova tells Meduza. “I can’t even say I like any of the opposition leaders. But I’m ready to represent myself. Until we become — I don’t know — cleaner, in the eyes of the people, nothing good will come of this.”
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Story by Lilia Yapparova with additional reporting by other Meduza journalists. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale.