Exiles Cannot Save Russia But the West Can Learn From—and Should Support—Those Who Fled Putin

Michael Kimmage and Maria Lipman

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In late 2022, a Moscow court sentenced the Kremlin critic Ilya Yashin to eight and a half years behind bars. He was a prominent and outspoken member of the Russian opposition and an ally of Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny, prominent opposition figures who both met untimely deaths. Had he not been freed in last month’s prisoner swap with the United States, Yashin, too, might have met an untimely death. Now exiled in Berlin, he can do his political work unimpeded.

Yashin did not want to leave Russia. He would have preferred to stay: he told reporters at a press conference in Germany, “I understood my imprisonment not only as an antiwar struggle but also as a fight for my right to live in my country, to engage in independent politics there.” He had asserted a right that his government flatly rejected. Navalny asserted the same right when he returned to Russia from Germany in 2021, knowing full well the tribulations that he would endure.

Yashin’s desire to pursue independent politics in Russia, even after having been imprisoned for pursuing independent politics, is understandable. The country’s political future will be written not in Berlin or London or New York but in Russia itself. It will be written by those who live out the war there, whether or not they support it. To leave is to lose the opportunity to participate in the process and to abandon the country in wartime, inviting shame and stigma, especially for those who settle in the West. To leave is also to join the exiled opposition, an unstructured network far removed from the levers of power in Moscow.