The price of normalizing Russia

Having read Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez for my book club last month, I was struck, like probably many Russian readers, by how recognizable his fictional Latin American dictatorship looks to us today. I guess one could say, paraphrasing Leo Tolstoy, that all happy democracies are happy in their own way, but all unhappy autocracies are alike.

I will not go into detail about which paragraphs of the novel read like they have been written about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, or how striking it is to see February 23rd on one of the pages – the date that Márquez may have picked at random, but that to us is the day before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But one important resemblance is that in the book, the ageing dictator and the entire nation are trapped in a never-ending time loop, and so is Russia it seems. And I fear that, while a ceasefire would finally bring some much-needed respite and a chance to recover for Ukraine, it may push Moscow deeper into the authoritarian consolidation cycle, if it is accompanied by a return to “business as usual” between Russia and the West.

What returns?

Speaking after this year’s scaled-back Victory Day parade, Vladimir Putin said he felt that the war with Ukraine was “coming to a close”, which many commentators took as a signal that Russia is ready to resume peace talks. Putin also suggested former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder as a possible European mediator, but both the German government and EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas have already dismissed this idea. Schröder, who is considered Putin’s friend, used to work for Russian state-owned energy companies and never explicitly condemned Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Had his candidacy as a middleman been accepted, that would have indicated that returning to the pre-2022 status quo was an option. Kallas had forestalled this by stating back in April that “there can be no return to business as usual with Russia, even after Moscow ends this war in Ukraine.” Yet, given the state of the global economy, it is difficult not to anticipate the sliding back to at least some semblance of old foreign policy patterns, driven by financial considerations.

Following February 2022, the West did not break its economic ties with Russia as cleanly as some wanted. Yale’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute has been tracking which international companies have stayed in Russia in one form or another. There are dozens of corporations that did not withdraw but only postponed some plans or scaled back on some operations while keeping return options open. They will be able to hit the road running once the surrounding political context changes.

It is not my place to talk about the suffering of the Ukrainian people, speculate about post-war justice, or discuss what deal Ukraine or its European partners should consider acceptable. Thus, I will focus on Russians, and more specifically on the Russians who are against the war. These people will have no say in the matter but will also be impacted by the “deal”, if it takes place, in more than one way. After four long years, a resolution of the conflict, however temporary or unfair, is tempting. And in practical terms, Russians now living on both sides of the border would benefit from the possible consequences of post-war normalization, such as being able to use their bank cards when travelling, facing less scrutiny when opening bank accounts overseas, or being able to see their loved ones more often and with fewer visa restrictions in place and direct flights restored.

However, if the business-as-usual logic does win in the process, there may also be pressure on Russian political emigrants to return. After all, we remember that when the civil war in Syria had ended, several EU member states suspended the processing of Syrian asylum applications, even though that decision seemed extremely hasty. As it is, Russian activists already struggle with having their asylum claims accepted, as some immigration officials in the EU refuse to believe that even “small-scale” activism may lead to a long prison sentence in Russia or that mobilization is not actually over.

Not everyone is determined to stay an emigrant though. For instance, there exists a "By the First Flight" project, whose stated mission is to unite members of the Russian emigrant community willing to return home and “build [a] democratic Russia after the collapse of Putin’s regime”. Setting projects and slogans aside, I personally know some very dedicated human rights defenders who remained in Russia as long as they could, and intend to return to their homeland as soon as it is relatively safe for them to do so, all in order to help people on the ground. The question is how will we know it is safe to return or even just visit?

The new wave of Russian emigration triggered first by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and then by mobilization coincided with the 100th anniversary of the so-called “Philosophy Steamer” and the expulsion of the prominent members of the Russian intelligentsia by the Bolsheviks. Expelled from the country, or driven out by the revolution and the civil war, many of the “white émigrés” later returned to Soviet Russia and were crushed by its repressive apparatus. Thus, if one is to learn a single lesson from that period of Russian history, it could be: if you are far away, do not come back, until you are absolutely sure you are in no danger. Unfortunately, in the post-2022 reality, Russian citizens who are detained immediately upon crossing the border learn this lesson the hard way.

In the meantime, according to a policy paper published by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, none of the visa-free countries in the South Caucasus, Central Asia, or the Western Balkans are fully safe for Russian political emigrants. With the danger of extradition in Turkey; tightening residency regulations in Georgia, Kazakhstan and Montenegro; the threat of Russian political interference looming in Armenia; and Serbia trapping citizenship applicants in a legal limbo; it is difficult not to consider the EU as the only truly safe harbour in the wider region.

A disturbing picture

Journalists in exile tend to worry about losing touch with reality on the ground. Yet, this is something that happens to any emigrant. It is difficult to reconcile peaceful Instagram stories posted by friends back in Russia with the news, where something seems to be on fire all the time. In fact, news about Russian domestic political developments increasingly resembles a particularly dark and unhinged version of The Onion – the American satirical newspaper famous for publishing absurd, fictional stories that parody politics and current affairs (or The Onion’s Russian “cousin” – the satirical news agency Panorama). Taken out of context, the headlines seem to escalate in absurdity: blocking the largest Russian-language fanfiction archive, marking children’s books and Russian classics with drug harm labels, or opening 66 administrative cases for “Satanist propaganda”. The problem is that these and other surreal and grotesque developments, which often look like satire at first glance, turn out to be actual events.

Even if we set aside the direct and indirect consequences of the war itself, such as Ukrainian drone attacks causing fires and airport closures, internet shutdowns meant to prevent those drone attacks, or veterans committing violent crimes far from the frontlines, and leave only what the Russian government is doing on its own, there remains a disturbing picture.

Books are published with blackened out lines and entire pages while teachers and parents report each other to the police for dissent. Colleges pressure their students to enlist in the army, and human interactions seem to have reverted to their Brezhnev-era settings. Hundreds of individuals and organizations are designated “foreign agents” and “undesirables”. People are detained, beaten up, tortured, and put behind bars for things that should not even be illegal in the first place.

Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights organization (recently designated an “extremist organization”), currently recognizes 1,643 persons as political prisoners, and at least six political prisoners died in custody in the first four months of 2026. Every single one of those stories is heartbreaking in its own way.

In this bleak reality, it can be difficult not to lose hope. On May 12th 2026, the Russian ocean researcher and lifelong dissident Nina Litvinova killed herself at the age of 80. She blamed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and domestic political repression in her suicide note. The same feeling of helplessness in the face of evil prompted the 37-year-old programmer Alexander Okunev to set himself on fire next to a Second World War memorial in Kaliningrad. This happened on February 24th 2025, on the third anniversary of the full-scale invasion. However, local authorities managed to conceal the incident, until the information about it finally came out more than a year later.

Self-immolation is both an ultimate sacrifice and an act of true despair. And as a form of political protest, it is very familiar to Europeans. In 1969, the philosophy student Jan Palach set himself on fire in Prague to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and in 1980, 75-year-old Walenty Badylak committed suicide by self-immolation in the Kraków market square protesting the suppression of truth about the Katyń massacre by the communist authorities. Their sacrifice, and the sacrifice of many others, did not immediately change the course of history, but was part of the wave that eventually toppled communism.

We know from history that political change, however swift it looks in the moment, takes years to brew. It has already been 14 years since the Bolotnaya Square protests in Moscow. The peaceful protesters of those pre-2022 years have served their time in prison, and one of them, Ildar Dadin, has even died fighting for Ukraine – but the scale of political repression in Russia has only gotten worse, despite their best efforts.

Today, there are many dedicated Russians in exile who volunteer for anti-war causes. They keep independent media and NGOs afloat with their donations, write letters to political prisoners, and hope to contribute to the future rebuilding of Russian civil society. There are also immensely brave people remaining in Russia, who refuse to leave, but who also refuse to compromise. They have not given up, but desperation sometimes drives them to radical actions. If the war ends with no defeat and no reckoning, and matters of justice get postponed, I do hope that at least these people, both activists and those who were accidentally pulled into the repressive machinery, will not be abandoned and forgotten in a rush to sign new trade contracts. They will still need support and a safe place to go in a time of need.

“Belarusization” of Russia

Thinking about the EU’s future dealings with Russia, one can draw some interesting parallels with Belarus. It has been noted that Russia sometimes resorts to repressive mechanisms that the regime of Alyaksandr Lukashenka has already tried out and found efficient – a phenomenon labelled the “Belarusization” of Russia. But Putin is not the only who can learn from Lukashenka’s experience.

The self-proclaimed “last dictator in Europe” has shown us how an ageing autocrat might gradually transform himself from being a complete persona non grata back to someone who is accepted at the negotiating table. His regime is still extremely repressive, elections are still a sham, and Belarusians living abroad are still denied voting rights and consular services. But there are prisoner swaps and even leaders of the opposition have been released in exchange for the United States lifting some sanctions.

The war in Iran has increased the global importance of Belarusian potash fertilizer exports, and the second Trump administration has proven ready to offer sanctions relief in exchange for specific concessions from Minsk, demonstrating that where the imposition of sanctions has not worked as a deterrent, their lifting can be used as an incentive. This does not indicate a transformation of the Lukashenka regime, and, as Amnesty International has put it, the much-awaited release of political hostages "must not be mistaken for justice". But the Belarusian example shows that there can be value in limited re-engagement with an authoritarian regime, if it saves lives.

The Russian leadership and state-owned media turned gaslighting into a form of art. A random current events programme on Russian television would baffle an impartial and informed observer, so detached it would be from reality. Talking heads contradict each other, contradict facts on the ground, and contradict themselves – and that does not seem to make any difference. But this lack of accountability comes in handy, when peace talks are underway. That simply means that Putin can “sell” any outcome of the war as victory to the domestic audience. However, this domestic framing should not shape how other international actors treat the situation.

The ceasing of military aggression will not change the essence of the regime in Moscow, and only time will show if EU leaders remain as resolute about not returning to business as usual, as they are today. With global economic uncertainty driving political decisions, it may be difficult not to let pragmatism overshadow humanitarian concerns, but if some form of post-war normalization in Europe’s relations with Russia is on the cards and if international companies are going to lobby for it, it would be fair to insist on certain preconditions.

The easing of sanctions and the signing of trade deals could, at least in theory, be used as leverage to elicit concessions from the Kremlin – whether it is negotiating the release of political prisoners or putting an end to the persecution of certain social groups, such as, for instance, LGBTQ+ people or Jehovah’s Witnesses. No one knows how long Russia’s “autumn of the patriarch” is going to last, and Russians may be stuck in the same authoritarian cycle for a long time still, but hopefully the EU will not rush to press the “reset” button and will avoid getting dragged into the same time loop.

Nina Rozhanovskaya is an international relations professional and the former coordinator and academic liaison in Russia for the Kennan Institute.