You want to be forgiven for considering everybody in Russia both helps the warfare in Ukraine or is just too scared to do the rest about it. A dominant narrative is that Russian civil society is passive, complicit or has been quashed to the purpose of being neutralised.
For the previous two years, I’ve been researching Russian anti-war resistance. This has concerned carrying out interviews with activists and different individuals who left Russia following the outbreak of warfare and are actually scattered internationally. As a substitute of disappearing into exile, many of those individuals are mobilising to voice their opposition to the warfare and withstand the regime in Moscow.
Some exiled Russians are sending cash and letters of cohesion to political prisoners in Russia and their households. Others have coordinated felony assist to strengthen anti-war defendants within Russia and are lobbying western governments to differentiate between the Kremlin and Russian civil society.
On the identical time, elite exiled Russian opposition figures together with Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Kara-Murza, have labored to shape the Platform for Discussion with Russian Democratic Forces. It is a consultative frame within the parliamentary arm of the Council of Europe that, established in 2026, targets to offer Russia’s opposition a world voice.
Russian opposition political activist, Vladimir Kara-Murza, speaks at a press convention in London in 2024.
Tolga Akmen / EPA
Throughout my analysis, I’ve additionally come throughout exiled Russians who’ve been operating unbiased Russian-language media via Telegram channels and YouTube. Although in fresh months, Russia’s telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, has significantly limited get entry to to those platforms. It has achieved so in an try to censor outdoor data and drive Russians to undertake the state-controlled Max app.
I’ve encountered circumstances of anti-war Russians in a foreign country serving to other people within the nation break out mobilisation through providing safe haven and protected routes out of Russia. One among my interviewees, a 22-year-old Russian now residing in a foreign country, had even established transnational networks throughout Europe, the Caucasus and Russia to lend a hand criminally prosecuted anti-war Russians flee the rustic prior to status trial.
Indigenous diaspora networks have additionally knowledgeable native communities in areas of Russia the place there are huge ethnic minority populations corresponding to Tuva, Tatarstan, Buriyatia and Chelyabinsk in regards to the realities of the warfare. Those come with using underage infantrymen and heavy recruitment from ethnic minority areas.
However in addition they come with the level of Russian and Ukrainian casualties, which Russia’s executive has equipped nearly no reliable information on. The Middle for Strategic and World Research, an American thinktank, stated in early 2026 that Russian forces had suffered just about 1.2 million casualties for the reason that get started of the warfare.
Those Indigenous networks have posted movies on platforms corresponding to Instagram, YouTube and Fb, in addition to messages on Telegram and Sign, to counter reliable state narratives in regards to the warfare. Moscow has justified its warfare in Ukraine through pronouncing it’s protective Russian-speaking voters there, status as much as western expansionism and returning Russia to its former nice energy glory.
Russians take care of their baggage on the Russia-Kazakhstan border within the Chelyabinsk area as they get ready to go away the rustic in 2022.
Pavel Tabarchuk / EPA
In the meantime, anti-LGBTQ+ regulations presented in December 2022 have prohibited any perceived propaganda about non-traditional relationships in Russia. This was once adopted through a Russian preferrred courtroom choice in 2023 to designate the “international LGBT movement” as an extremist organisation. This ruling has made any affiliation or strengthen for LGBTQ+ communities a legal offence.
Based on this clampdown, exiled Russians have stood in cohesion with LGBTQ+ compatriots within the nation who’ve confronted discrimination. My analysis has exposed circumstances of other people offering safe haven and protected routes abroad, growing virtual protected areas for Russian LGBTQ+ communities and lobbying for the safety of those communities in Ecu international locations.
Russian resistance
Russians don’t fall right into a unmarried, neat, complicit mass. For the reason that get started of the warfare, a various resistance motion has labored to counter the Kremlin’s authoritarian practices and propaganda. It displays a broader number of voices, values and stances than is lately imaginable in Russia, providing a an important perception into the longer term political aspirations and hopes of strange Russians.
This motion is not going to overthrow the Russian executive. However the skill to ship regime alternate will have to now not be the one measure of resistance. The motion is difficult the narrative that each one Russians strengthen the warfare, whilst additionally serving to stay democratic political concepts alive for Russians within the nation for when alternate turns into imaginable.
As one in all my respondents instructed me: “We have to stay in touch with supporters in Russia and plan for transition. There will be no time to strategise, so the plan has to happen now. We try to do as much as possible to be prepared.”
The resistance of exiled Russian dissidents issues now not only for working out Russia nowadays. It additionally tells us how opposition survives in authoritarian regimes extra widely, highlighting the function that diasporas can play in maintaining democratic civil society transnationally.
Dissent does now not disappear when it’s beaten at house. It relocates, adapts and reconfigures throughout borders.
