One the eve of the Russian antiwar and anti-Putin march in Berlin held on November 17, Ukrainian ambassador to Germany Oleksiy Makeiev made a point by publishing an op-ed in Die Zeit in which he dubbed it as “a walk without dignity and consequences”.

As far as dignity is concerned, two of the organisers, Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, have been only recently released from prison and swapped for Russian spies and hackers. Both ended up behind bars for campaigning against the Russian invasion in Ukraine. The third organiser, Yulia Navalnaya, is the wife of Vladimir Putin’s main political rival, Aleksey Navalny, who died in prison when he returned to Russia after barely surviving poisoning by a weapons-grade chemical substance.

All three were targeted by Putin’s secret services already in the times when Makeiev, a career bureaucrat, worked for the government of Putin-friendly Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, subsequently toppled by the Maidan Revolution.

The criticism is also peculiar considering what kind of anti-Putin Russians the Ukrainian government actually embraces and provides shelter, funding and Western-supplied weapons to. These most prominently include a number of prominent Russia neo-nazis, some – like Sergey “Malyuta” Korotkikh – with clear links to the FSB, at least in the past.

The rationale behind undermining a rally that was unequivocally pro-Ukrainian is hard to fathom for the uninitiated. Why would a Ukrainian diplomat join the chorus of Kremlin propagandists in attacking Putin’s sworn enemies?

Members of the Russian opposition generally avoid discussing xenophobic pro-Ukrainian propaganda narratives in public because it opens the Pandora box which contains infinitely more dark matter regarding the nature of the political regime in Ukraine and the West’s role in maintaining it. Few anti-Putin politicians and activists are willing to face, not to mention confront it.

The lack of courage to talk about most crucial issues pertaining to the conflict in Ukraine and realistic ways out of it is what currently renders most public figures representing domestic opposition to Putin’s regime both impotent and irrelevant in the global political conversation. But it doesn’t mean that some of them have no role to play in future.

Infighting and impotence

When the bulk of the Russian opposition and civil society was kicked out of the country in the wake of Putin’s full-out invasion in Ukraine, the widespread expectation was that his regime couldn’t survive the seemingly suicidal act of entering an epic battle against the almighty West.

But almost three years into the big war in Ukraine, it is clear even to the most ardent of pro-Ukrainian cheerleaders that the Russian economy proved resilient to Western sanctions, while the country’s military forces and Putin’s political regime are stronger than ever. That leaves anti-Putin Russians stranded in Europe and elsewhere with the few prospects of returning and making an impact at home for years to come.

The feeling that the Russian opposition was thrown under Putin’s bulldozer alongside Ukraine to satisfy the appetite of the warmongering lobby in the West for conflict with Russia is the larger than life elephant in the room. But this theme remains a taboo, not least because of the flimsy legal status of Russian exiles in their host countries and their existential dependence on Western funding which comes with many political strings attached and is often associated with darker quarters of the Western political establishment. This is why the discourse largely alternates between earnest do-gooding, passionate virtue signalling, internal squabbles and a great deal of dissociation.

Supporting Ukraine becomes an exercise in masochism because all you get in exchange is – at best – arrogant rebukes from people who are stylistically hard to distinguish from Putin’s sidekicks back home. At worst, it is ugly and never-ending online campaigns of intimidation conducted by troll and bot farms engaged in ill-thought out pro-Ukrainian psy-ops.

Looking at the discussion on X (former Twitter), it may seem that all the members of the opposition are preoccupied with smearing each other rather than focusing on fighting the regime. Zillions of non-entities and trolls as well as some prominent personalities, often known for their previous collaboration with Putin’s regime, endlessly attack the only opposition force with any clout in Russia, Navalny’s FBK foundation. The foundation has a support team of its own, which helps it to defend itself, but it also contributes to the entire discourse by drifting away from real issues.

But it would be simplistic and simply wrong to dismiss this predicament as petty infighting caused by competing egos. There are deeper and darker forces at play.

Front and centre of this controversy are violent attacks on Navalny’s key ally Leonid Volkov and the wife of prominent economist Maxim Mironov that have occurred in places so far apart as Vilnius and Buenos Aires.

An investigation conducted by FBK pointed finger at the former Russian oligarch, currently Israeli businessman and Haaretz newspaper shareholder, Leonid Nevzlin. It was based on the leaked correspondence, allegedly between Nevzlin and a shady Poland-based Russian lawyer suspected of organising the attacks. The lawyer, Anatoly Blinov, was arrested in Poland in the aftermath of the publication. The suspected perpetrators, who happen to be Polis ultras, were arrested earlier.

Nevzlin, a former business partner of the prominent anti-Putin figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky and a major character in the Yukos case, funds a vast network of Russian opposition groups and personalities. A few of these vehemently defended him against FBK’s accusations. These were joined by PACE rapporteur on Russian democratic forces Erik Kross. A former head of Estonian foreign intelligence, Kross said that FBK – which previously conducted groundbreaking investigations into Putin’s corruption as well as Navalny’s poisoning – shouldn’t be conducting “amateurish” investigations in the EU so as not to undermine local law-enforcement.

As a PACE rapporteur, Kross prefers to work exclusively with the Nevzlin-linked Russian Antiwar Committee which happens to be based in Berlin. The committee, expectedly, didn’t endorse the November 17 march, organised by its FBK foes.

Flag debacle

The rally in Berlin was preceded by a massive controversy regarding whether the Russian national flag was welcome at the event. Initially introduced by Peter the Great, the three-coloured flag resurfaced as a symbol of Russia's anti-communist revolution in the August of 1991 which is when it was officially adopted by the Yeltsin-led Russian republic inside the crumbling Soviet Union. But radical activists reject it as the flag under which the Russian army invaded Ukraine.

As the march kicked off, 16-year-old activist Luka Andreyev waved the Russian flag at the front of the column for a short period before it was taken away by organisers. Andreyev later accused Anton Mikhalchuk of Free Russian Foundation (FRF) of snatching the flag from him. Mikhalchuk said it was “other people” but he dubbed Andreyev as a “provocateur”.

As a result of this incident, the teenager faced a campaign of intimidation in Estonia where he lives with his parents, which included smear in the media, calls for deportation and his portraits, complete the accusation of him embodying “the spirit of the Kremlin”, appearing on billboards in the capital Tallinn.

The incident highlighted some of the more controversial aspects typical of many exiled opposition communities.

FRF is genuinely respected by many in the Russian opposition for its advocacy on behalf of Russian exiles and for directing assistance to people in need. Yevgenia Kara-Murza, the wife of the rally’s organiser Vladimir Kara-Murza, is one of FRF’s vice-presidents. The foundation also runs a major community space for Russian exiles in Berlin, which also explains its prominence at the march.

It also attracts some of the leading Russian political thinkers as it develops its own think-tank that makes a valuable contribution to the discussion. More controversially, it has admitted to running its own online troll (or, in their parlance, elf) factory fighting against “Kremlin narratives” – with Mikhalchuk as a coordinator.

There is, however, a key difference between Navalny’s FBK and FRF. The former used to run the largest opposition network spanning all across Russia and rallying millions of supporters – an organic grassroots organisation. The latter is a US-based organisation with close links to the State Department.

FRF is not transparent about its funding, but the highergov.com service, which monitors US government funding, lists a $947,000 grant issued to FRF by the State Department in 2022 and spent throughout the next year. The foundation’s board is chaired by the former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labour, David Kramer.

Until recently, the board also included former Estonian president Toomas Henryk Ilves – a xenophobic Twitter personality who referred to Russians as “rapist nation” on a number of recent occasions.

One of the current board members is Alina Polyakova, the president of CEPA – a hawkish think-tank lobbying for the US military industrial complex which, in the assessment of the author of this piece, worked hard to send Russia and the West on the collision course in the run-up to Putin’s full-out invasion. During the year of brinkmanship, which preceded the attack, its most prolific speaker at the time, former commander of the US forces in Europe General Ben Hodges, relentlessly campaigned for crossing perceived Putin’s red lines and escalating on every front.

In 2023-24, CEPA issued two big reports regarding the West’s conflict with Russia, one of which Poliakova co-authored. Both argue that Russia will remain a threat to the United States even after Putin is gone, so the only answer for decades to come is Russia’s containment which is a euphemism for maintaining a new Iron Curtain and enveloping Russia with a hostile neighbourhood.

In its desired scenarios, CEPA reports leave little to no role for the Russian opposition. In fact, they describe it as a “spent force”.

In this framing, Russian exiles are reduced to Western-paid info-warriors and convenient idiots working against their country’s future rather than for the “beautiful Russia of the future” – as Navalny famously called his project of democratic transition.

The deadlock of containment

CEPA represents policies that clearly failed and buried Ukraine, as well as the Russian pro-democracy movement, under their rubble – and not only in terms of precipitating Russian aggression in Ukraine instead of preventing it. More broadly, it is the policies of alienating Russia that grew out of post-Cold War triumphalism and NATO’s desperate search for raison d’être in the early 1990s, which brought about the entire conflict. These policies destroyed the chance of integrating Russia into the Euro-Atlantic political and security space – something that Russian leaders clearly desired in the period between 1991 and Putin’s bellicose Munich speech in 2007.

Pushing for containment is a clear non-starter for Russians of any political standing, except for a small number of mercenary Quisling types. There is little surprise that these views are also explicitly opposed by respected Russian political analysts collaborating with FRF.

A recent FRF report analyses scenarios for the transition of power in Russia stressing the likelihood of “mishustisation” (after Putin’s prime minister Mikhail Mishustin) in post-Putin period. That presumes a collective of technocrats taking over from the personalistic regime and slowly drifting towards democracy “as a necessary tool of governance” – that is, for pragmatic, rather than idealistic reasons. In that scenario, the opposition could advocate free elections and play a role in them.

Same section of the report, authored by Vasily Zharkov and Nikolay Petrov, argues against the policy of containment. It first of all points out that this policy is futile in the absence of support of China and other key players in the greater, non-Western world. It also asserts that containment results in social mobilisation around the regime as well as benefits Russia’s military-industrial complex. Therefore it undermines the prospect of democratisation and leaves West-friendly forces without a chance of offering Russians a viable alternative to Putinism.

The report generally avoids the elephant in the room – the very real prospect of Putin winning the conflict in Ukraine by achieving a peace that ensures Ukraine’s future non-alignment and the absence of Western military presence in its territory. What will be the role of the opposition in this eventuality?

There is no straightforward answer to that question because of a large number of variables. But Putin’s regime in its present form is the product of the conflict with the West, so if the conflict ends on Kremlin’s terms, the mishustisation scenario is just as likely as in the case of the regime's collapse. After all it is the technocrats, not hardliners, who made this victory happen. The need for total mobilisation will disappear and pragmatic considerations will likely steer the explicitly non-ideological mafia state regime towards relative liberalisation.

A grade of reconciliation with the political opposition will be possible – and it will be consistent with Putin’s political philosophy of not dividing Russians into the “reds” and “whites”. Of course, this possibility will arise exponentially if Putin and his close henchmen, responsible for political assassinations and wars, will leave the scene altogether – something that’s inevitable within a decade, given their age.

The possibility of democratic evolution in Russia after the fall of communism was undermined by the West’s relentless Drang nach Osten. The way Russia works is that change can only come when the perceived Western threat is the lowest, the way it was in the late 1980s, the time of disarmament and denuclearisation.

The conflict in Ukraine has shown very clearly that escalatory policies achieve the opposite result, which benefits militaristic lobbies on both sides of the geopolitical rift, but definitely not the populations or strategic interests of the countries involved.

The best the Russian opposition can do at the moment, apart from advocating for political exiles, is steer the West away from repeating the mistakes which led to the current conflagration over and over again.