The other Russia that is not

Since its establishment in October 2025, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe's (PACE) Platform for Dialogue with Russian democratic forces in exile has now completed both its winter and spring sessions. The PACE President Petra Bayr delivered the opening address in classical European institutional rhetoric. She declared that Europe has not forgotten Russians who oppose the war and the regime, that it "supports those Russians who oppose the war of aggression, who respect Ukraine's territorial integrity, and – let me underline that – who accept responsibility for the harm inflicted by their state." The last clause, on collective responsibility, is the most revealing. It names precisely the condition the Russian opposition in exile has not genuinely met and the one western institutions continue to treat as self-evidently satisfied.

After those sessions, the gap between the platform's stated ambitions and its actual composition is difficult to ignore, raising serious questions about whether it risks becoming a vehicle for an agenda misaligned with, or at worst directed against, European priorities. To understand how this came about, it is necessary to start with what the platform was originally designed to be.

 

S: Dialogue by design

The platform's institutional origins lie in the shock of February 2022. Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Council of Europe faced an immediate question: what to do with the democratic, civil society, and human rights infrastructure it had spent decades cultivating inside Russia, but which was now being systematically dismantled? The answer was engagement at a distance. This rationale was later echoed by PACE’s then president, Theodoros Rousopoulos: "We will not turn our backs on Russians who defend democracy, human rights and freedom – and who reject this war. This platform will be a place for this other Russia to speak – clearly, openly and without fear."

The platform's stated purpose is dialogue. It carries no official representational authority and creates no alternative governing structure. This distinction matters: the opposition has consistently treated the platform as something other than what PACE designed it to be. The final composition of the platform, representing what PACE describes as "the other Russia", is divided into two groups totalling 15 figures: opposition politicians and civic figures including Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and Garry Kasparov, and a second group of representatives of indigenous peoples and national minorities. This is what PACE treats as the credible, democratic voice of Russia in exile. Following the PACE winter and spring sessions, the participants outlined their priorities for the platform: freeing political prisoners, defending the rights of anti-war Russians abroad, supporting Ukraine, and tightening sanctions against Kremlin officials. Presented this way, the agenda sounds uncontroversial. Examined more closely, it raises a different set of questions.

The platform's members have consistently interpreted their mandate in ways that go beyond what PACE intended – treating a consultative body as a vehicle for political representation. Kara-Murza and Dmitry Gudkov have labelled the platform as “alternative political representation” and an “international recognition” of Russian democratic forces as a legitimate partner for the West. They list “preparing a roadmap for democratic transition” as a key priority, not dialogue with European parliamentarians, but planning to guide or assume the administration of a post-Putin Russia. Kasparov has gone further, calling for the creation of a voter base to formalize the platform’s composition, thereby effectively turning the dialogue mechanism into an elected political body.

This framing reflects a significant misreading of what the platform is and what authority its members hold. Among the participants, only Gudkov has ever held elected office. There is no indication that the opposition figures could rally significant support inside Russia. Those who remain inside Russia, working under genuine risk, largely view their exiled counterparts as having lost touch with domestic reality. Yet, the question of legitimacy does not exist in isolation; it connects directly to the platform's most substantive policy territory of sanctions.

 

S: A fundamental caveat

The platform members are vocal about the need to strengthen sanctions, pointing to the continued presence of western components in Russian weapons systems and the shadow fleet as the primary mechanism for financing the war against Ukraine. Some of their technical analysis can be useful. The Free Russia Foundation has briefed EU Sanctions Envoy David O'Sullivan on specific Kremlin workarounds. Gudkov plans to supply European ministries with economic analysis, while Natalia Arno has promoted the opposition as uniquely equipped to advise on hybrid warfare and transnational repression – having experienced them directly.

This offer of expertise is real. But it comes with a fundamental caveat: these are political figures engaged in a long-term struggle for power and legitimacy, which makes treating them as neutral analytical sources a category error. The question is whether European institutions have the tools to distinguish genuine expertise from self-serving analysis, and the record suggests they do not. A senior figure in the Anti-Corruption Foundation, founded by Alexei Navalny in 2011, conducted undisclosed communication with oligarch Mikhail Fridman seeking sanctions relief, demonstrating that even the most credible actors in this ecosystem are not immune to compromising entanglements. The Russian intelligence services have a well-documented record of infiltrating opposition circles in exile.

A related pattern emerges: virtually every platform member is vocal about what they describe as the discriminatory and counterproductive nature of sanctions on ordinary Russians. Kara-Murza argues that penalizing people for holding a Russian passport relies on the unacceptable concept of “collective guilt”. Gudkov has announced his intention to lobby for a "new design of sanctions" that does not affect ordinary citizens. The result is a consistent dual message: tighten sanctions where they hurt the regime, loosen them where they inconvenience Russians, including those abroad.

On the specific question of prisoner exchanges, the position is clearer: Kasparov and Khodorkovsky both firmly oppose easing economic sanctions to secure political prisoners, with Khodorkovsky warning that Putin, unlike Alyaksandr Lukashenka in Belarus, would take twice as many hostages in response. The same self-protective logic that shapes the platform's approach to sanctions is also at work in its members' most prominent domestic policy priority: the rights of Russian emigrants. Nearly every platform participant identified the legal situation of anti-war Russian emigrants as a top priority – visas, residency status, and protection mechanisms. This is a legitimate humanitarian concern, but several members push it further. Kasparov proposed a “Russian Taiwan” concept: a formal political status for Russians who have broken with the regime, while Mark Feygin, a human rights lawyer, proposed that frozen Russian state assets be used not only for Ukraine's reconstruction but also for the Russian diaspora. He also called for the reintroduction of Nansen passports for stateless Russians.

The cumulative effect of these positions is a sustained lobbying effort, conducted from inside a European institution, primarily on behalf of Russian interests. The "Russian Taiwan" concept, redirecting frozen assets toward the diaspora, and fighting "discriminatory" sanctions all serve the same function – constructing the architecture of a government in exile while accumulating institutional weight. These figures need to preserve the idea of the "Good Russian": if the West decides all Russians bear collective responsibility, opposition leaders lose the special status that is their only source of political capital.

 

S: Government in exile?

These dynamics become more apparent when set against the minority and indigenous bloc, whose agenda – such as war tribunals tracing Russian aggression back to Chechnya, decolonization, and documenting the forced mobilization of minority soldiers – sits in direct tension with the dominant bloc. Khodorkovsky has stated that decolonization advocates should have no role in discussions about Russia's future. While Kara-Murza praises the indigenous delegates, and any joint platform decision requires the support of at least three of the five indigenous representatives, his vision for a post-Putin Russia centres on maximum regional autonomy within a preserved Russian state. In doing so, the platform's dominant bloc has turned a dialogue mechanism into a forum for debating Russia's future statehood, asserting, in the process, a role as government in exile that the platform was never designed to confer and has no authority to grant.

This dynamic has not gone unnoticed outside the platform. Belarusian delegates to the Council of Europe have described the same pattern firsthand: at a PACE event focused on the harm caused by the Russkiy Mir (Russian World), Russian opposition representatives objected that the discussion was taking place without them. Margarita Vorikhova, a participant in the Council of Europe's Contact Group on Belarus, described the reflex directly: rather than engaging with how Russian imperial culture affects neighbouring states, the Russian delegates insisted on positioning themselves as primary regional experts, speaking for Belarusians and Ukrainians.

Western media reinforces this habit, routinely inviting Russian oppositionists to analyse Belarus or Ukraine while regional voices go unheard. When the question of cultural imperialism arises – why Pushkin monuments are being removed, why the Russian language is increasingly experienced as a language of aggression – the opposition responds with puzzlement, framing the problem exclusively as Putin's propaganda rather than confronting the broader imperial culture within their own ranks. The funding dimension compounds this: Belarusian delegates note that Russian opposition figures frequently use these platforms to channel European attention and resources towards Russian independent media, at the expense of the more immediate struggles of Ukraine and Belarus.

This assumed authority over Russia's future makes the conduct and accountability of these figures a matter of direct relevance. Critical Russian-language media have raised consistent questions about funding and spending transparency, and the past affiliations of certain members. Whatever their sourcing, these reports deserve a serious response and some platform members have engaged with them directly, which is precisely the standard expected. Others have not. What they have received instead is silence, or contempt towards the journalists raising them.

Notably, media access to the spring assembly was also restricted. An opposition that dismisses scrutiny rather than engaging with it does not make the case that it represents something genuinely different, and the unresolved questions have not stayed external. They have become a source of open conflict between the platform members themselves.

The scrutiny these figures face is not only external. Recently, Ruslan Kutayev was suspended from the platform, reducing its membership to 14, after describing LGBTQ+ people as "outcasts and perverts" and dismissing honour killings in the North Caucasus as an exclusively family matter. Separately, Lyubov Sobol accused Mark Feygin of systematically bullying women within the platform, alleging that he targets women because he considers them easier to pressure, and that he and others deliberately cultivated a toxic atmosphere to force her and other members out. These are not isolated episodes. Instead, they are the latest in a pattern of controversial statements on ethnic minorities, gender, and internal conduct that has run through the platform since its inception, and which sits in measurable tension with the European values it is nominally convened to represent.

 

S: Excluded by design?

The internal conflicts and unanswered questions surrounding individual members do not exist in isolation. They are symptoms of a deeper problem with how the platform was assembled, and more specifically, with whom PACE chose to exclude entirely. The platform was built on a stated commitment to engage with Russians "who oppose the war of aggression" and "respect Ukraine's territorial integrity". That commitment, however, does not extend to one key grouping: the armed Russian volunteer units fighting on Ukraine's side – the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) and the Freedom of Russia Legion.

These are Russians fighting against Putin's war at the cost of their lives, not opposing it from European capitals. European bureaucrats were reportedly unwilling to include active military personnel, citing what they considered rigid and radical positions. Several platform members were visibly relieved by the outcome. Kasparov offered the compensatory argument that figures like Mark Feygin and Andrey Volna, who visit the front lines and publicly support armed resistance, provide adequate proxy representation for that constituency. Yet, a dialogue platform which excludes the Russians most unambiguously committed to Ukrainian survival, on the grounds of institutional discomfort, while retaining figures who question collective responsibility and lobby against sanctions on ordinary Russians, has made a set of choices whose implications deserve scrutiny. Even the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Navalny's organization, which formally declined to participate, is effectively present through its former lawyer Lyubov Sobol, who sits on the platform and advocates for the same priorities: the rights of Russian emigrants abroad.

The “political prisoner” credential that runs through so much of the platform's public discourse merits scrutiny. Western institutions have long conflated the status of political prisoner with democratic legitimacy, as if imprisonment by a repressive regime automatically confers the moral authority to represent a society and guide its future. This romanticization has deep roots, reaching back to figures like Andrei Sakharov, and it shapes how western audiences receive the platform's members. The problem is not that time spent in Putin's prisons is meaningless, but that it does not constitute a political mandate. After the 1917 revolution, White Russian émigrés spent decades in Paris and Berlin issuing declarations and holding congresses. Western elites received them with respect, but they had no impact on what happened inside the Soviet Union. The movements that have successfully operated from exile share one characteristic the current Russian opposition apparently lacks: a dense, organized network inside the country capable of acting on their direction, and there is no evidence such a network exists.

 

S: The window that may never open

At the platform's opening session, the PACE President Petra Bayr offered a vision that encapsulates the platform's central tension: "One day, a different Russia can return to Europe – not by rhetoric, but by transformation ... It will be for the citizens of Russia to lead this transformation. But it is our responsibility to be ready to support it when the window of opportunity opens. And it will open.”

What PACE has constructed, however, is not a dialogue with Russian democratic forces but a dialogue between a European institution and a political vacuum. By anchoring its engagement around the idea of a "different Russia" embodied in these figures, PACE sidesteps confronting the actual Russia: a state whose war is supported, or at minimum tolerated, by the majority of its population. Hope is not a political strategy – it is a poor substitute for a realistic assessment of the regime's stability and the opposition's limited domestic leverage.

The contradiction at the heart of the platform is nevertheless worth examining directly. Bayr called on participants to "accept responsibility for the harm inflicted by their state". Instead, the platform risks becoming a venue from which those same participants lobby against collective guilt and pursue interests that have more to do with their own positioning than with Ukrainian survival. And when the window Bayr hopes will open, the people on the ground in Russia may be reluctant to hand the keys to a group who spent years in European capitals competing over committee seats and institutional positioning.

The limits of this approach are perhaps most directly illustrated by the speech of Oleksandr Merezhko, a Ukrainian MP who questioned the very basis of the platform's legitimacy: "there are no objective criteria" for who qualifies as a representative of Russian democratic forces, and "the best kind of legitimacy when it comes to representation is the struggle with arms against the oppressive Russian imperialist regime." This active struggle is precisely what PACE chose to exclude.

On non-violent methods he was unsparing: “non-violence doesn't work ... non-violence plays into the hands of the aggressor.” On the thesis that Putin is somehow distinct from the Russian people, he was equally direct: “Vladimir Putin is indistinguishable from the Russian state and Russian people in general, because all the crimes against Ukraine have been committed and supported by Russians ... to absolve Russian people of all those crimes is against reality, against facts.”

Most critically, he named what many platform members visibly resist acknowledging: “sometimes it looks as if the Russian opposition wants to retain the empire while taking the place of Vladimir Putin's regime ... The problem is not only Vladimir Putin – the problem is Russia itself."

These are not comfortable observations for a European parliamentary institution. They are, however, more honest than the alternative, which is what PACE has currently built: a platform that mistakes proximity for representation, advocacy for expertise, and hope for strategy.

 

Beka Iromashvili is a final year MA student within the Central and Eastern European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CEERES) programme jointly run by the University of Tartu, the University of Glasgow, and the Jagiellonian University. He was previously an editorial intern with New Eastern Europe.