Exiled Russians Build Transnational Anti-War Resistance
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- Oula Kadhum, a Leverhulme Trust Early Career fellow at SOAS, spent two years interviewing exiled Russian activists scattered worldwide, documenting resistance that contradicts the narrative that Russian civil society has been quashed
- Garry Kasparov, alongside Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Kara-Murza, formed the Platform for Dialogue with Russian Democratic Forces, a consultative body in the Council of Europe's parliamentary arm established in 2026
- Exiled Russian activists send money and letters to political prisoners inside Russia, coordinate legal aid for anti-war defendants, and lobby Western governments to distinguish between the Kremlin and Russian civil society
- Roskomnadzor has restricted access to Telegram and YouTube in an attempt to force Russians onto the state-controlled Max app, targeting independent Russian-language media run by exiles
- Indigenous diaspora networks have informed communities in Tuva, Tatarstan, Buriyatia, and Chelyabinsk about underage soldiers and heavy ethnic-minority recruitment, posting on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Telegram, and Signal to counter state narratives
- The Center for Strategic and International Studies reported in early 2026 that Russian forces had suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties since the start of the war — a figure Russia's government has provided almost no official data on
- Russia's 2022 anti-LGBTQ+ laws and 2023 supreme court ruling designating the "international LGBT movement" as extremist have prompted exiled Russians to build digital safe spaces, shelter networks, and European lobbying for LGBTQ+ compatriots facing criminalization
Why it matters: This research documents a coordinated, transnational opposition — political, legal, media, and humanitarian — operating outside Russia and explicitly planning for post-regime transition. For Western policymakers, the exiles' active lobbying to be distinguished from the Kremlin offers a diplomatic channel for engaging Russian civil society without legitimizing Putin's government.
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