Paris —
Boris Nadezhdin looked tired but energetic when we met him on a hot day in Paris. He had been in France for just over a week and was still reeling from his hasty departure from Russia after being suddenly summoned by Russia’s powerful Investigative Committee, which threatened to face criminal charges.
The Russian politician, who has been in Russian politics for 40 years, said he realized it was “just a matter of three days” before stepping down was no longer an option. “Usually, after you go to this place, you get your criminal papers, go to court, and after the trial, you go to prison: Lefortovo,” he explained, referring to Moscow’s most notorious prison known for its brutal treatment of dissidents and political prisoners.
During the interview, he checked his cell phone multiple times to get updates from his lawyer.
He had left his family in Russia and was absent from his daughter’s wedding on the day we met. But he manages to stay positive. “The good news is I’m alive and free,” he said.
Many other rebel groups in Russia, led by President Vladimir Putin, were not so lucky.
Just a month ago, Nadezhdin was campaigning for Russia’s parliamentary elections in September. What followed was a series of brief but brutal interventions by the authorities.
First, on July 10, he was declared a “foreign agent.” This designation meant, among many other restrictions, that he could not serve as a member of Congress. When he announced he would continue campaigning regardless, he was arrested on administrative charges for displaying extremist symbols, a claim he described as ridiculous. On July 17th, he received a small fine.
The day before, he had received a message on his government services account, an online portal that Russians use for everything from medical care to speeding fines, that he was banned from leaving the country.
Three days later, he received a summons from Russia’s top law enforcement agency, the Investigative Committee, and the next day, the ban on him leaving Russia “disappeared” from his online account. He believes this may have been a deliberate signal, allowing him to travel without encountering any resistance.
“If the Kremlin government wants to expel its opposition politicians, it will firstly give them a criminal investigation and secondly it will pave the way for Russia to leave the country.”
Nadezhdin, a Russian academic and former member of parliament in the early 2000s who most recently served as a city councilor in his hometown of Dolgoprudny on the outskirts of Moscow, rose to international fame when he sought to challenge President Vladimir Putin in the 2024 presidential election with a manifesto calling the Ukraine war a “fatal mistake.”
His efforts to gather the required 100,000 signatures sparked an explosion of public support, with people lining up outside his campaign offices across Russia and in other cities, in an unusually organized protest movement in a country that continues to systematically stamp out political opposition.
Eventually, Russian election authorities ruled that he had collected enough signatures to fall below a threshold, and he was barred from running.
But despite mounting obstacles, including a bankruptcy case against him that cost him his home, he said he pressed on, motivated by a sense that more and more Russians supported his anti-war message.
“Since the beginning of this year, we have seen a significant change in public opinion in Russia,” he said. “Everyone wants to stop the war. It’s in society, in the elites and in the closest people around President Putin. And, of course, we also need to understand what this war actually means for the Russian economy, for Russian cities.”
At the same time, Putin’s approval ratings have also declined (albeit from high levels), surprising in a country where state media has instilled in Russians the idea that Ukraine and the West are to blame for the war, according to various Russian polling agencies.
Nadezhdin believes that those around Putin, as well as the Russian president himself, understand that “the only way now to repay the huge support of the people… is to stop the war.”
He doesn’t know when or how that understanding will translate into action, and he’s not optimistic about a lasting settlement.
“It is quite possible to freeze future strikes and mutual strikes. But the question of how to keep peace with the West, how to keep peace with Ukraine, is a question for the next generation.”
Faced with declining approval ratings, the Kremlin is returning to more repressive tactics. Just this week, Russia’s Supreme Court blocked Yabloko, the only remaining liberal anti-war party on the parliamentary election ballot, from running. After the verdict was handed down, dozens of young Russians gathered outside the courtroom in solidarity.
“The political system has exposed itself,” Yabloko co-founder Grigory Yavlinsky wrote on his Telegram channel. “It is clear that the desire for peace and freedom was much stronger than the authorities thought.”
Yabloko has survived almost as long in Russian politics as Nadezhdin, dating back to the early 1990s, each having survived brutal pressure tactics, but was allowed to remain unless he gained too much support. Nadezhdin’s dismissal is even more noteworthy because he tried to follow the rules.
“I’m not a strong enemy of the regime like Nemtsov or Navalny,” he told CNN, referring to two of Putin’s most charismatic opponents: Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead near the Kremlin in 2015, and Alexei Navalny, who died in a remote Russian penal colony in 2024.
“During my 40-year political career and 20, 25 years of active opposition, I never crossed any red lines. I was integrated into the Russian political system,” Nadezhdin said.
These red lines, he believed, were never meant to criticize Putin personally (although he did criticize his policies, particularly the war in Ukraine), and never to accept foreign funding.
“The red lines have changed and it is now absolutely impossible to criticize the war in Russia.”
