Russian resistance to the Vladimir Putin regime is seething these days. The shock caused by the failed mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Company mercenaries, which has exposed the weakness of a Russian president living in his physical and mental bunker, has prompted some opposition figures in exile to reconsider their strategy. “The Prigozhin affair taught us that there are time windows,” remarks Anastasia Shevchenko, a member of the opposition. “Balloons, banners, peaceful anti-war and anti-Putin protests are fine, you have to move on, but they don’t work when you’re facing terrorists like those who run the Kremlin.” “If we democrats want to defeat the regime, we have to think about weapons when the time comes,” he begins.
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Shevchenko became the first person in Russia to be charged and convicted of “repeated involvement in the activities of an undesirable organization” for his ties to Open Russia, a now-defunct association founded by former oligarch and former politician Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The opponent spent two years under house arrest in Rostov-on-Don. She was filmed with hidden cameras at her home and molested. He couldn’t even hold his seriously ill daughter’s hand as she died in a Russian hospital. Finally, a year and a month ago, he fled his home with his family in the middle of the night and, after a long journey, ended up in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, home to an important Russian community opposed to the Kremlin and the war against Ukraine.
The dissident, now part of the Russian Action Committee, which coordinates resistance activities and numerous large-scale anti-invasion protest campaigns – “the priority is that the war ends and Ukraine wins” – speaks of the need for the opposition to be ready to assert its interests with non-peaceful formulas whenever a new opportunity arises. The lingering reverberations of the Prigozhin coup attempt coincide with the recent arrests of ultra-nationalists like Igor Girkin, who are accused of war crimes. And the regime doesn’t seem so immune anymore.
The idea that you need to take things to the next level is still in its infancy, but it’s starting to spread. Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in Russia and today one of the most well-known opponents in exile, also dealt with this formula after the failed rebellion of Wagner’s boss – who actually only mobilized to maintain power and his economic empire, threatened by his rivals in Putin’s circle of trust – and claimed that the fall of the Russian leader could only be achieved by force. He says this will be essential so that Putin is not simply replaced by another autocrat when this new opportunity arises – as many analysts and Western intelligence sources fear when regime change occurs – but that genuine democratic change is initiated.
The debate is how and when the limit will be crossed. Shevchenko supports sabotage long-established by organizations such as the Feminist Resistance to the War, led by poet and dissident Daria Serenko. But he also believes supporting Russian fighters fighting Kremlin troops in Ukraine’s International Legion could be an option to explore. Even if the results of the support of those soldiers who launched raids on Belgorod at the end of May and increased the feeling of insecurity on the Russian border are quite symbolic.
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The opposition Anastasia Shevchenko, in Vilnius.Maria Sahuquillo
Sevchenko concedes that this support is “controversial and complex” due to the far-right background of some members of these groups – the Freedom for Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps. But sometimes the choice is not between good and bad, but between bad and worse, he says. And maybe you can make things move. Not far from Vilnius’ Garden Boulevard, where Shevchenko is sipping lemonade and contemplating the collapse of the Kremlin regime, a giant billboard hangs on a skyscraper. “Putin, The Hague is waiting for you,” it said. In March, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the Kremlin chief on war crimes charges over the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.
Not everyone shares the opinion of reaching the next level. In Riga, Vilnius, Berlin, Tbilisi and Brussels, the Russian opposition vacillates between those who join the debate started by Shevchenko and Khodorkovsky and those who are basically preparing for the day after Putin. However, the opponent points to the need to work on both things in parallel and to continue to press for the West to step up sanctions against Russia and stall its war economy.
Russian dissent – both among imprisoned and exiled leaders – is mixed. By Alexei Navalni, who was arrested in 2021 as soon as he returned from Germany to Moscow, where he was recovering from a serious poisoning orchestrated by the Kremlin; Mikhail Khodorkovsky; former chess champion Garry Kasparov; Natalia Arno of the Free Russia Foundation, a US-funded association that supports exiled activists from Russia and Belarus. And many other groups, such as Serenko’s feminist resistance, now in exile in Georgia. There is no single leader and it is difficult to maintain a large umbrella group, as the EU sometimes would like to have. MEPs and officials have in some cases cited the Belarusian opposition as a role model, mostly clustered around Svetlana Tijanóvskaya, who has opened popular offices and embassies around the world.
But in the case of Russia today, despite the efforts of various actors and the holding of numerous conferences, this idea is unrealistic. Indeed, patterns of behavior that prevailed in conservative and nationalist Russia have been repeated in the opposition. In one of the most recent forums held in Brussels in the European Parliament, criticism of gender imbalance was voiced due to the lack of leading women speakers. Furthermore, this union around a single person is undesirable for many voices, since it would not represent a prism with different faces.
In Riga (Latvia), which for years has been a haven for persecuted Russian adversaries and independent journalists, Natalia Pelevina considers it unrealistic to talk about formulas for taking up arms. acts of sabotage? It may be small, but it’s difficult to go further, claims the opposition activist pragmatically, who left Russia with her daughter in the early stages of the invasion after spending several days in detention for protesting two steps from the Kremlin wrapped in a Ukrainian flag in protest of the war, at the same spot where her fellow RPR-Parnás party, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, was shot dead in 2015.
Pelevina believes that the opposition to the Kremlin has two main possible avenues: to act and help Ukraine win the war, and to make plans for when Putin is no longer in power. And it does so by attempting to rebuild civil networks and all social nodes inside Russia, where years ago the authorities mowed down almost every speck of civil organization: from environmental organizations to associations dedicated to historical memory or the rights of ethnic minority groups. A country that, even before the start of the imperialist war against Ukraine, suppressed every attempt at protest and in which dozens of opponents are in prison. From Alexei Navalni to Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for criticizing the invasion, or Ilya Yashin, who was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for denouncing the crimes of the invasion. All duly accompanied by a propagandistic diet constantly broadcast through state channels and the Kremlin-based media, which is increasing over the years.
It’s not easy to reconnect networks that have never been too strong, admits Pelevina, who lived through the repression and became the victim of a scandal along with opposition leader Mikhail Kasyanov when pictures of the couple having sex, which the Russian security apparatus secretly recorded to discredit them (he was married), leaked to the public. With other dissidents, he organizes meetings via video conference or encrypted platforms with activists who continue to operate in Russia as best they can. Although they do so in a different way, away from traditional politics and with an emphasis on local or regional activism. They identify mobilization points—like protecting the environment, unease about the closure of an animal shelter, dissatisfaction in a neighborhood about installing a sewage treatment plant—and work on it without visibly addressing political issues or identifying as activists or dissidents, but as committed neighbors.
A sign reading ‘Putin, The Hague is waiting for you’ in Vilnius. PHILIP SINGER (EFE)
“This is how we analyze the mood of the population to see whether anything is changing. We are also breaking isolation, because in such a large and diverse country as Russia, in Siberia, in Yakutia, in other regions, the opponents feel alone,” says Pelevina. She is critical of herself and the rest of the dissidence. “We have more responsibility than other Russians because we dealt with the regime, fought against it and knew what it was capable of,” he says. “Sometimes we were too focused on ourselves and didn’t articulate our message well to get it across. We also largely failed to get out of the bubble of Moscow and Saint Petersburg,” adds the opponent, who points to the importance of transitional justice – truth, justice and reparations – without which, she asserts, Russia will end up in, or eventually return to, another dictatorship.
It is difficult to assess the level of support for Putin and his regime, which has turned Russia into a country ruled by the security apparatus. Opinion polls in a country where protests are banned and the term “war” against Russia’s invasion is criminalized are unreliable. There are some details that can provide clues, such as the fact that during Prigozhin’s attempted military coup – which, however, was celebrated and cheered along with his mercenaries in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don – there were no demonstrations in support of the regime and the population waited.
Russia’s war against Ukraine and the Eurasian country’s responsibility for the large-scale invasion are also dividing the Russian opposition. There are those, like Pelevina, who believe that this is a war for the whole country and that it is also the responsibility of the silent majority, which has its head in the sand like an ostrich. Others continue to refer to it as “Putin’s war.”
Konstantin Fomin believes that this gap between some opposition organizations will close. The activist, banned in Vilnius, is one of the managers of Reforum Space, a center that acts as a discussion forum and place to organize anti-war campaigns and wants to show that there is a dissidence beyond famous opponents like Khodorkovsky or Navalni. “The webs woven here can make a real difference,” he says, seated at a table in one of the rooms at the donation-funded venue in the historic center of the Lithuanian capital. Behind it, next to an electric piano, is a sculpture of Putin in a cage. “It’s hard to run away from him. It seems his presence is constant inside and outside of Russia,” Fomin jokes, pointing to the jailed Kremlin boss.
Konstantin Fomin in the opposition center Reforum Space in Vilnius.Maria Sahuquillo
The activist, who has worked through various civil rights organizations in Russia, is part of the current that advocates preparing for the event that Putin, with all possible economic, legal or health knowledge, is on his way to restore the country and plan a transition. “We have to be organized and educated. If 20% of the diaspora is trained to work in a democratic Russia, change can be brought about in due course,” he says. He also talks about the need to work with the people of Russia. “Not everyone can or will be an agent of change, but we need to expand,” says Fomin, who also stresses that economic resources and Western cooperation will be required.
Meanwhile, activists are secretly working on less-peaceful solutions to hasten the “day after.” Or at least, says Dmitri, to open the eyes of the public, that there is resistance, that there is criticism of the Russian war in Ukraine. The young man who agreed to the meeting in an Eastern European city on the condition that it take place without cellphones is part of one of these small sabotage networks. One day, an important railway line for logistics at the front is blocked; another, the fire of a recruit barracks. He says: “Let it be known that we exist, let fear spread among the Kremlin terrorists. And let us see that change is coming and possible.”
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