Executive Summary

• Since 2022, Russian human rights organizations have not disappeared but transformed into semi-exiled structures that retain meaningful operational capacity inside Russia despite escalating repression. 
• The sector’s core adaptation has been the development of a “hybrid mode” that combines external resource mobilization with in-country service delivery through decentralized and risk-distributed networks. 
• These human rights organizations have shifted their primary function from rights enforcement to preserving civic infrastructure—maintaining networks, solidarity, and the minimal conditions for collective action under authoritarian constraints. 
• Community building and low-risk collective action have emerged as central strategies, enabling politically engaged citizens to resist social atomization while avoiding direct repression. 
• In key subdomains—legal defense, military draft evasion, civic hubs, and environmental activism—human rights organizations continue to generate tangible, if limited, forms of impact within Russia. 
• However, their reach is narrowing, their access to new audiences is weakening, and fragmentation and distrust within the broader civic ecosystem are increasing. 
• As Russian human rights organizations experience further political hostility from the Kremlin and advancing co-optation, accompanied by the contraction of international funding, donor strategies must pivot toward long-term resilience, decentralization, and support for adaptive, domestic-facing initiatives rather than short-term measurable outputs. 

Introduction

Together with the mass exodus of antiwar citizens, Russia witnessed the relocation of numerous civic organizations following the regime’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This more intensive outflow added to years of considerable emigration by like-minded people and groups hoping to escape state repression. While the Russian government had been targeting civil society with restrictive measures for over a decade, wartime measures escalated repression to an entirely new level. Today, organized defense of civic rights, ranging from legal advocacy to environmental activism, can expose individuals to the most severe criminal charges, including “extremism” charges that carry multiyear prison sentences. The threat of such penalties has produced a political environment in which open nongovernmental civic action is nearly unthinkable.

These conditions in turn have given rise to two competing narratives about the current state of Russian civil society. According to one version, Russia today is a “civil desert,” meaning independent activism has been extinguished on Russian territory, while exiled grassroots initiatives remain fragmented, weak, and largely disconnected from developments inside the country.¹ The other narrative argues that, despite operating from exile, many organizations have retained effective tools of influence within Russia, complemented by a wave of new domestic initiatives that operate discreetly yet sustain solidarity among antiwar and antiregime Russians.²

The debate resurfaced during 2025 amid a sharp contraction in external donor funding, following the revision of US foreign aid priorities.³ With respect to Russian civil society initiatives, the discussion boils down to a fundamental question: Is Russian civic activism, including by exiled organizations, still worth supporting, and what tangible outcomes can be expected from their work?

This report maintains that the “civil desert” narrative is likely overstated. Rather than suffering practical extinction, the sector has transformed itself under the new post-2022 repressive regime. The research below examines the impact strategies through which nominally exiled actors continue to influence developments inside Russia.

By 2025, three distinct groups of Russian exiled and semi-exiled initiatives had taken shape: 

1. Political opposition projects, typically centered on prominent personalities, oriented toward visible media content, and often publicly contentious;
2. Institutionalized civil society organizations (CSOs), including professional nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with a track record and large audiences in Russia that transferred parts of their operations to foreign host countries; and 
3. Local activist initiatives that were founded mostly in the 2020s, are not fully institutionalized, and remain reactive and event centered.⁴

This research focuses on the second group. On the one hand, institutionalized CSOs seek to generate the most transformative impact across the widest range of Russian society. On the other hand, they have been hit hardest by the donor funding crisis of 2025. The redesign of their funding system will be one of the factors that determines these organizations’ effectiveness in the medium and long terms. 

We define human rights (HR) organizations broadly to include entities working across multiple dimensions of rights protection—from traditional advocacy for civil and political freedoms to the defense of economic, cultural, religious, and environmental rights. We use the term “exiled organizations” to refer to groups that have relocated at least part of their team outside Russia but mostly retain operational capacity in Russia. The term encompasses those organizations that relocated before 2022 and those that left afterward. This research focuses only on the organizations whose core mission remains directed toward audiences inside Russia as opposed to the diaspora.

The analysis draws on 49 interviews with representatives of HR organizations, 15 interviews with international donors, and secondary data (see Appendix for details).

Together, these materials provide a comprehensive picture of how Russian exiled and semi-exiled HR organizations have evolved since 2022, including the pressures they face, the adaptations they have made, and the new forms of their impact inside Russia.

The Impact of Human Rights Organizations in Russia

To assess whether their impact persists, we examined how HR organizations have adapted operationally and strategically after 2022. The landscape of Russian HR organizations is diverse, and the pressures they face, as well as the opportunities available within their respective subdomains, vary considerably. Yet most organizations after 2022, regardless of the sector, had to carry out (I) infrastructural adaptations, the basic organizational changes needed to preserve their impact while in exile, and (II) programmatic adaptations, the sector-specific adjustments associated with the tools and methods each organization used in its work.

Infrastructural Adaptations

The infrastructural adaptations of HR organizations since 2022 can be grouped into three key developments: switching to a hybrid mode to work across borders, focusing on community building as the main goal, and prioritizing actions that ensure safety for and solidarity among members.

Hybrid Mode

A core element of infrastructural adaptation has been the shift of HR organizations to a hybrid mode. In this mode, administrative and financial operations are moved outside of Russia, while the core service-delivery activities remain inside the country or are carried out by staff who regularly commute in and out of the country. Such hybridity requires boundary-crossing operations and members located in different countries. The choice to adopt this arrangement was driven by the evolution of the repressive regime in post-2022 Russia, but it has also become a strategic imperative. 

As many interviewees emphasized, the semi-exiled structure—with a sufficient number of staff who are able to work inside Russia—is essential for preserving impact in this domain. Much of the human rights work must be done on the ground, such as legal representation in court or environmental campaigns in specific locations. This is one of the differences between the human rights domain and, for instance, exiled educational or media projects; the HR organizations preserve a larger hybrid presence within Russia.

Working in a hybrid mode requires far more than splitting functions between inside and outside Russia. It has pushed HR organizations to undertake the following transformations:

• Security protocols became an essential institutional element. The HR organizations either had to develop completely new protocols or significantly amend the existing ones to manage interactions among external staff, internal teams, and volunteers inside Russia. Regular security trainings are aimed at ensuring that staff inside and outside the country “remain on the same page,” and that those abroad better understand “the context on the ground.” Prior to the wartime repression, such protocols were relatively rare; now they have become the bare minimum for operating and an integral part of the daily routine. In the event of a failure in security protocols, there is a network of emergency-exit support groups that mostly developed in the post-2022 environment and provide assistance with urgent evacuation from the country. The mere existence of these organizations and access to their staff significantly increases activists’ sense of security and their willingness to continue working inside Russia.⁵
• Designated public figures in exile absorbed repression risks, shielding in-country staff. With their public outreach, such figures help attract new supporters inside Russia, who can connect with on-the-ground staff for volunteering or assistance.
• Organizations adopted a strategy of public closure and quiet reopening. They deliberately shut down well-known brands that had become “toxic” due to the Kremlin’s targeted repression, and reestablished the same work under new—often multiple—names. Although such closures are emotionally difficult, they help shed reputational “toxicity,” particularly the risk of criminal prosecution, and preserve operational links with in-country teams.
• Organizations shifted from hierarchical to more decentralized, cell-based structures. They now rely on regional teams rather than exiled or Moscow- and St. Petersburg–centered leadership. The shift reflects, on the one hand, the fact that senior managers now operate largely from abroad and delegate more decision-making to in-country staff, and on the other hand, a pragmatic need to remain flexible and less visible to security agencies that target public figures or those who can be identified through financial controls.

Fragmentation and decentralization are reshaping the entire human rights landscape. Whereas before 2022 the sector consisted primarily of widely recognized large and medium-sized organizations, it is now evolving into a more rhizomatic structure: a dense web of small domestic initiatives that are interconnected through overlapping activist networks, many of which also remain connected with larger legacy CSOs whose senior leaders operate from exile.

This growing interconnectedness has become one of the defining features of today’s human rights ecosystem in Russia. 

As the Hannah Arendt Research Center’s field research based on 2024 data has shown, interconnectedness is reflected in cross-community linkages among activists on the Telegram messaging application. In the network graph below (see Figure 1), the nodes represent Telegram-based activist communities operating inside Russia, while the ties indicate overlapping membership between them.⁶ The picture suggests a rootlike network: many smaller communities remain connected through shared participants rather than one or several major nodes. Human rights defenders themselves (see section II.1 for more details about this group) appear to play a bridging role across several other subdomains, while environmentalist communities form a more distinct and self-looping cluster. Overlapping membership across these groups does not necessarily imply coordinated goals or a unified strategy, but it does increase mutual awareness of initiatives and projects and, as a result, the capacity for collective action.

The hybrid mode of operation represents a core feature of the current human rights landscape. As one of our experts noted, organizations now function through two “circles of resistance.” The external circle mobilizes resources from abroad and absorbs public and legal pressure, while the internal circle delivers services on the ground and sustains the interconnected networks that keep civic life alive inside Russia.

Human Rights Community-Building Efforts as an Antidote to Social Atomization in Russia

In 2022–23, rather than requesting ordinary services from HR organizations, democratically minded and antiwar Russians who remained in the country asked for ways to counteract their sense of isolation and political abandonment.⁷ To meet this need, HR organizations rapidly refocused on community-building practices, creating environments in which like-minded people could interact without exposing themselves to political risks.

These community-building efforts typically rely on three tools:

• Turning volunteer engagement into an outreach method, as volunteers themselves became an in-country audience. Several large HR organizations noted that in the months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine they experienced a surge of people seeking to volunteer, driven less by a desire to assist the organization and more by their own need to show solidarity, reduce stress, and remain connected to others who shared their views. In response, organizations launched regular volunteer-recruitment waves, improved volunteer-management systems (databases, surveys, onboarding procedures), and introduced semiprivate volunteer events and benefit-distribution channels that now function simultaneously as support spaces, trust-building mechanisms, and tools to maintain stable, low-risk engagement inside Russia.

• Online clubs offering regular group interaction, including weekly or monthly workshops, seminars, or informal discussion sessions. Some of these focus on applied activist skills—digital security, legal-risk assessment, fundraising—while others revolve around broader topics, such as moderated psychological-support groups, language-learning clubs, relocation-preparation discussions, or simple weekly and monthly “chat rooms.” Invitations are often shared through trusted networks rather than publicly. In the case of public calls, organizations use vetting to screen participants. While necessary, this practice limits the reach of the organizations to current members and their trusted circles.

• Regular offline gatherings with nonpolitical topics to maintain contact among like-minded people in a given city or district. Such events often have infotainment formats—such as open lectures, film screenings, book discussions, debates, historical walks, board-game evenings, small art festivals—and provide opportunities for meaningful interaction while remaining outwardly low-risk.

Among the offline formats, letter-writing events for political prisoners emerged as the most frequent and mobilizing. They have multiplied steadily since the full-scale invasion: more than 3,000 such events were held in 2022–25, with roughly 35% taking place in Russia. Public events in Russia even outnumbered those abroad during the first two years after the invasion, then shifted toward more discreet formats (see Figure 2).⁸

According to one activist in a noncapital region of Russia, by 2024 these gatherings were increasingly held without public announcements at hyperlocal venues, recreating what participants described as a “dissident-kitchen” atmosphere: small, trusted circles where political discussions feel safe. Our data show that in 2025, organizers of Russia-based events were 2.5 times less likely to publicly disclose their location than for those held outside Russia, instead sharing it with participants only after registration and vetting. This shift partly reflects an uptick in police raids on such gatherings.⁹ Yet publicly announced events remained numerous enough to maintain wide regional coverage (see Figure 3) and to provide a low-risk pathway for political socialization.

Even if repression against this particular format intensifies further, the underlying demand for (semi-)public offline gatherings inside Russia is likely to persist, and HR organizations will develop similar outwardly nonpolitical, solidarity-based formats to perform the same function.

Safe and Solidarity-Based Collective Actions

In an attempt to engage a larger group of democratically minded Russians inside the country, many HR organizations began developing a repertoire of safe civic collective actions—forms of engagement within the shrunken space for law-abiding political participation. As one activist explained, the goal is to show people in Russia that despite the Kremlin’s growing criminalization of dissent, there are still ways to take antiwar or antiregime action “right now, not in a distant future,” and that therefore “there is no reason to give up.”

In addition to being relatively safe, these actions normally meet two other criteria. They must allow participants to express empathy and positive solidarity grounded in shared antiwar or democratic values, and they must produce a visible, public outcome. In other words, the action must send a signal to others that people are still willing to act. This visibility is what turns isolated gestures into something that feels collective.

The emerging repertoire of safe collective actions developed in two directions.

First, they focused on building infrastructure that allowed people to make small contributions to a campaign as a way of sharing in a collective act. Our experts frequently mention online fundraising marathons for political prisoners as a rare example of an initiative that demonstrated, even to the participants themselves, that exiled groups can still produce tangible effects inside Russia.¹⁰ In 2023–25, these marathons gathered over 75m rubles ($1m) in small donations. 

In parallel to fundraising marathons, which are time-bound and campaign-specific efforts, small-donation practices also expanded through more permanent platforms that supported a wider range of antiwar and democratic initiatives. One example is the Zaodno fundraising platform, which accumulated 110m rubles ($1.5m) in donations between 2022 and 2025.¹¹ This project demonstrated that small donors tend to stay on the platform to support other initiatives in addition to the one that originally drew their attention. According to platform data, around 40% of donors give to at least two initiatives in a single session. By donating to similar initiatives, people perform a double act of solidarity—joining others who supported a specific initiative, and supporting multiple other initiatives, including those that they only learned about by visiting the platform.

In 2022, several professional groups in Russia—academics, clergy, medical workers, architects, and others—issued public antiwar statements, and some signatories later faced persecution.¹² HR organizations sought to preserve this emerging guild-based solidarity by building support infrastructures for members of specific groups who took antiwar or antiregime actions and suffered consequences.¹³ For individual donors inside Russia, participating in crowdfunding or otherwise contributing to such projects functions as both an expression of solidarity with the antiwar sentiment and a symbolic compensation for their own inability to engage in overt antiwar activity.

Second, organizers have been developing new formats for collective dissent. The most notable offline actions included the mobilization of long voter lines during the 2024 presidential campaign, both on election day for the “Noon Against Putin” action, and earlier, when people queued to submit signatures for an independent candidate.¹⁴ The use of public queues as a low-risk form of protest expanded further in 2024–25, with citizens deliberately forming lines at the Presidential Administration to file complaints over issues such as new internet restrictions, a law on euthanizing shelter animals, or specific cases of repression.¹⁵ Joining these queues offers participants a safe way to express dissent while experiencing solidarity with fellow petitioners.

A similar form of solidarity through collective dissent occurs online, where people have increasingly used digital petitions, complaints, and formal submissions to state authorities to signal that many citizens are concerned about repression or state failure. A prominent post-2022 tool is the Dyatel platform, which adapts the Change.org model to the Russian context, producing complaints and queries based on formal templates to which Russian government agencies are legally obliged to respond.¹⁶ Users need only provide their personal details and sign a prewritten submission. Dyatel publicly tracks how many complaints have been filed, giving participants the sense that their action is not solitary but part of a broader rights-based campaign.

In one of the most meaningful forms of solidarity with war-affected Ukrainians as well as with antiwar Russians inside and outside the country, large ad hoc networks emerged to support Ukrainian citizens displaced from Russian-occupied territories. While this phenomenon initially emerged as a grassroots volunteer effort, it rapidly grew into a relatively sustainable and geographically distributed movement across Russian regions. The movement has provided logistical assistance to elderly and incapacitated Ukrainian citizens, who are often undocumented and left without means, helping them to leave Russia, reunite with their families, and receive support from volunteer organizations in Europe. Since the start of the 2022 invasion, this movement has assisted many thousands of displaced Ukrainians.¹⁷

Ultimately, the three forms of infrastructural adaptation—hybridity, community building, and safe collective action—prepared HR organizations to face the realities of consolidated authoritarianism. Such adaptation prevents activist networks from collapsing into private dissent, maintains the “connective tissue” that allows new initiatives to form, and preserves the minimal social conditions under which collective action, however small, remains possible inside an increasingly repressive system.

Programmatic Adaptations

While the previous section examined the infrastructural adaptations that reshaped how HR organizations operate under conditions of exile and repression, the following section explores their programmatic adaptations. These are customized strategies through which organizations seek to generate tangible impact within their respective areas of human rights work, reflecting the unique constraints and opportunities of each subdomain. The subdomains are not directly comparable, as differences in state pressure and civic presence have affected both the capacities of the relevant organizations and the forms of impact they can pursue.

Impact Through Presence: Protecting Rights in Courts and Prisons

Even before 2022, HR organizations in Russia rarely had any real chance of securing justice in politically driven cases; after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, those chances dropped to zero.¹⁸ As several representatives explained, this has reshaped the role of human rights lawyers. When a fair trial is unattainable, “the lawyer’s presence itself becomes the act of protection,” whether at court hearings, during interrogations, or throughout pretrial procedures. The same shift applies to organizations working with political prisoners. They cannot directly improve detention conditions or prevent rights violations, but they work to remain present in a prisoner’s life, maintaining contact, monitoring the observance of legal rules, and delivering correspondence, clothes, and hygiene products.

The organizations’ presence enables three indirect forms of protection.

• Protection through legal procedure: By filing motions, appeals, and procedural challenges, lawyers force investigators and courts to observe at least minimal rules of evidence. This constant legal pressure clogs an already overloaded system, slowing the repressive machine and modestly limiting its scale. Many HR organizations also continue litigating nonpolitical cases in which procedural mechanisms still work. Success in these cases could be leveraged as quasi-precedents in political cases.

• Protection through information: Defense lawyers’ access to case files helps them understand the ways in which repressions are carried out. Specifically, such access exposes investigative routines, surveillance triggers, and the patterns used to identify “offenders.” HR organizations analyze these insights and translate them into practical risk-mitigation guidance, helping activists navigate—and partially neutralize—the institutionalized arbitrariness of the regime’s repressive apparatus.

• Protection through visibility: A lawyer’s presence lowers the likelihood of beatings, pressure, or coerced confessions, since any abuse may generate formal complaints that require a response. Visibility signals that the case is being monitored, creating a deterrent effect and reducing the risk of escalation during the most vulnerable stages of detention. Ukrainian nationals held in Russian prisons are in particular need of such protection, as their situation is far more precarious than that of Russian political prisoners. HR organizations take on the most basic but vital tasks: locating detainees, adding them to lists or databases, and sharing this information with Ukrainian human rights groups.

The quasi-protective functions described above depend entirely on the preservation of a functioning network of defense lawyers inside Russia. Such a network is essential to maintaining professional standards in legal defense, disseminating the knowledge of current trends in criminal (in)justice, and simply upholding morale among those who work under tremendous pressure from authorities. To support this infrastructure, HR organizations must cultivate a broader professional community, supplementing their own in-house attorneys with a pool of lawyers who can join politically sensitive cases when extra capacity is needed, while also expanding regional presence and sharing experience in handling complex, high-risk proceedings.

The Kremlin is actively trying to erode the legal defense ecosystem through targeted reprisals and regulatory barriers, pushing politically engaged lawyers out of the profession.¹⁹ A key task for HR organizations is therefore to slow this attrition and prevent the professional community from collapsing. As one expert noted, Russia still hosts a surprisingly broad cohort of lawyers who are willing to work on political cases across most regions. This is a stark contrast to Belarus, where such a community has already been largely dismantled.

Impact Through Draft-Evasion Support: Reducing the Pool of Deployable Soldiers

Efforts to protect young men from conscription have a long tradition, dating back to the first movement of soldiers’ mothers in the late Soviet Union. Prior to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, a range of Russian HR organizations worked on protecting conscripts’ rights.²⁰ After the announcement of mobilization in September 2022, demand for this work skyrocketed. Existing organizations scaled up, new initiatives emerged, and the “antidraft/antimobilization” subdomain quickly became one of the most significant areas of human rights work in Russia.²¹

These organizations usually focus on two core tasks: helping people evade conscription once they have been targeted by draft offices, and assisting soldiers who seek to desert. One of the few measurable indicators of their impact is the scale of desertion. The UN special rapporteur on Russia reported that more than 50,000 Russian servicemen deserted between 2022 and 2024, and this has been confirmed by independent media.²² Requests for help continued to grow steadily into 2026 as legal exit routes from the military narrowed and the intensity of the war remained high.

Another line of work involves monitoring the Kremlin’s expanding toolkit for tracking conscripts, especially the digitalization of draft registries and new surveillance instruments.²³ By bringing together information technology specialists, lawyers, and data analysts, the relevant HR organizations identify vulnerabilities in these systems and develop practical guidance on how people can avoid conscription through legal avenues—such as alternative civilian service—or, when necessary, through informal means.²⁴ As the Russian authorities continually invent new ways to replenish the invasion force in Ukraine, this work has become an essential counterweight, limiting the state’s coercive capacity in the military sphere.

Impact Through Safe Spaces Inside Russia

Public spaces or civic hubs that can serve as coworking facilities, event venues, or locations for regular meetings remain a crucial element of Russia’s human rights infrastructure. Most of those related to human rights activity emerged before 2022, and many continued to operate after the invasion, adjusting their programming to lower their profile and appear apolitical.²⁵ Yet they still serve as gathering points for democratic-minded communities.

Beyond serving as anchors for the community-building practices described above, the spaces’ core impact lies in attracting new activists and helping them to navigate the field. Because civic hubs have a fixed, public-facing location and host a broad mix of open cultural or educational events, newcomers can attend as ordinary visitors, make first contacts, and gradually integrate into local activist networks. This onboarding function is far more difficult to replicate through invitation-only meetings or online events, which rarely attract people outside established circles.

Public spaces offer something rare under authoritarian conditions: a place to gather, express identity safely, and maintain a sense of dignity and continuity. As one activist described, in the post-2022 period these spaces function “less as safe spaces than as ‘brave spaces’”—environments that restore confidence, help people feel that “not everything is lost,” and allow them to continue living in Russia without abandoning their identity or activism. Many hubs also serve as spaces of “normalcy,” a psychological refuge from the suffocating atmosphere elsewhere in Russian public life.

Impact Through “Full-Cycle” Environmental Defense

Impact opportunities differ across human rights subdomains. While space has contracted sharply in some areas, the environmental field retains comparatively broader room for action.²⁶ At the same time, in light of Ukraine’s counterattacks on Russia’s oil infrastructure and the resulting spills of petroleum and other toxins, environmental activism can also attract political scrutiny from the authorities.

Although the Kremlin designated several major international environmental NGOs as “undesirable” in 2023, many environmentalists continue their work in Russia.²⁷ State pressure on environmental activists certainly increased, but in this subdomain, repression has been coupled with co-optation.²⁸ The regime has invested heavily in government-organized NGOs (GONGOs) and expanded funding for environmental projects.²⁹ The reason for the dual governmental strategy is simple: concern for environmental issues remains consistently high in opinion polls.³⁰ The number of ecological protests grew by nearly 40% between 2022 and 2024, with environmental activism becoming a substitute for more politically sensitive forms of civic engagement that are too dangerous to pursue.³¹

In this context, semi-exiled environmental HR organizations can still deliver something close to a “full-cycle” defense of environmental rights, in particular at the municipal and regional levels. Their work typically includes:

• Independent monitoring of environmental risks and publication of open-access data;
• The mobilization of residents and local activists for collective action, including public protest;
• Legal and advocacy support for local groups fighting violations of environmental regulations; and
• Participation in semiofficial forums, where they introduce independent expertise into otherwise state-dominated discussions.

Under existing political conditions, ensuring that environmental issues remain part of the public discussion is itself an important achievement. However, some of this work yields even more tangible results, with activists overturning harmful state decisions, often through open confrontation with local authorities.³² Delivering such outcomes can generate broader positivity about civic activism.³³ Several experts from outside the environmental sector noted that environmentalists’ success stories are “a rare source of optimism,” since they show that “real human-rights protection is still possible inside Russia.”

Constraints and Limitations on the Work of Human Rights Organizations

Since 2022, the political conditions for independent human rights defense have become increasingly inhospitable and far more dangerous, triggering serious infrastructural and programmatic adaptations. Despite these adaptations, ongoing human rights work in Russia faces further challenges that can significantly and negatively impact its efficacy.

The first and most fundamental challenge is reach. With the exception of specialized draft-evasion and environmentalist groups, the number of people receiving support from HR organizations is likely stagnating or declining. HR organizations today operate largely to preserve their existing democratic-leaning audiences rather than expand beyond them. Every forced “brand closure,” due to discriminatory designation as “extremist,” for example, results in a loss of followers and supporters who never fully reconnect with the smaller successor organizations.

The deeper problem here is the difficulty of reaching new audiences. Those HR organizations that stayed in the country after 2022 have struggled to adjust to the social realities shaped by new grievances and local protests. Lower public visibility, higher trust thresholds, and security-driven gatekeeping by the organizations themselves further narrow access.

As several interviewees noted, since 2022, HR organizations have not managed to attract “new waves of activists” from fresh state failures.³⁴ For instance, the groups were still able to provide legal support to detainees in the Baymak case, following an environmentalist protest in Bashkortostan in January 2024. However, they had virtually no capacity to support resistance to municipal reforms that were implemented across Russia in 2025.³⁵ Similarly, they found themselves sidelined during the oil spill in the Kerch Strait (2024–25), which attracted volunteers from across the country.³⁶ On this occasion, independent environmental groups were not able to compete with state initiatives.³⁷

The second challenge is that in several traditional human rights subdomains, the operating space inside Russia has narrowed so drastically that maintaining meaningful impact has become extremely difficult. This shrinkage is most acute in topical areas that the Kremlin views as politically sensitive or where it perceives traditional HR organizations as core adversaries.

As a former director of Aleksey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), Ivan Zhdanov, noted in a recent interview, by 2025 the group’s network of “underground regional organizations,” which were meant to facilitate antiwar civic activity inside Russia, had been losing momentum under the weight of repression.³⁸ The same trend has affected initiatives to defend Indigenous peoples’ rights and postcolonial movements: any activism in these subdomains is subject to persecution.³⁹ As a result, some organizations have shifted their efforts abroad, working to block the Kremlin’s attempts to launder its reputation in international forums for Indigenous representation through progovernment GONGOs.⁴⁰ After the regime’s 2023 ban on LGBT activism, the operating space for HR organizations in that sphere similarly contracted. Across these subdomains, independent initiatives inside Russia now face such intense pressure that only fragmentary activity remains feasible.

The third challenge is the extent to which Russian activists are enmeshed in an increasingly strained emotional climate and a deepening crisis of trust.

On the one hand, the divide between the “middle layer” of exiled CSOs—including HR organizations—and the “top layer” of political opposition groups has widened. Following a series of public conflicts between Russian political opposition leaders in 2024–26, civic activists have become frustrated with such figures, distancing themselves from political projects that they feel do not represent their interests, even if the projects and their spokespeople remain more visible to policymakers in democratic countries.

On the other hand, despite decentralization and other reforms under the hybrid model, a growing rift has emerged between large, well-established “legacy CSOs” with teams and cells inside Russia and the smaller grassroots initiatives that operate mainly on the ground. Some of these local groups feel that “legacy organizations” no longer speak for their interests. The two types of organizations can have sharply divergent views on the priorities and risks of human rights work in Russia, which become all the more important in interactions with international donors. 

The fourth key challenge facing HR organizations is artificial competition with GONGOs.

Domestically, the Kremlin combines the stigmatization and repression of independent civil society groups with massive public spending (significantly increased since 2022) aimed at cultivating loyalist alternatives. Because recurring private philanthropy remains relatively uncommon in Russia, state funding plays a central role across the entire Russian NGO sector. It allows the authorities to create networks of dependency, co-opting neutral initiatives or establishing GONGOs that substitute for independent CSOs, particularly in politically sensitive fields such as human rights.

Over the past several years, the authorities have expanded federal grant mechanisms, adding three new instruments to the all-purpose Presidential Grants Foundation. First, the Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives reshaped and increased public spending on cultural and arts projects with a patriotic and nation-building orientation. It has almost tripled total spending on these goals since 2022. Second, the grant program administered by a Soviet-style youth organization, Movement of the First, distributes 1.5bn to 2bn rubles ($21m to $28m) annually to support mainly projects in “patriotic education.” Third, the newly established Presidential Foundation for Nature channels 1bn rubles ($14m) per year into environmental programs. Together, these mechanisms raised total federal grant funding to 19.9bn rubles ($274m) in 2025, almost doubling the pandemic-era peak of 2020.

These allocations accelerate GONGO-ization by reorienting the sector away from advocacy. Prior to 2022, state funding mainly supported NGOs with a service-delivery orientation. New funding instruments actively push progovernment narratives in cultural, youth, and environmental fields, while marginalizing independent advocacy-oriented HR organizations.

Finally, there is an inherent contradiction between the transparency and reporting rules established by international donors and the Russian legal restrictions on foreign funding. This clash might become an insurmountable obstacle for semi-exiled organizations that aim to operate both inside and outside Russia, undermining their policy of low visibility and discouraging them from continuing their work.

Conclusions and Recommendations

Russian HR organizations have already undergone extensive transformation to ensure that their work remains effective. Despite the extraordinary and growing levels of repression imposed by the authorities, these groups’ work can still achieve short-, medium-, and long-term impact. Currently, they offer people an opportunity to resist the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine through low-profile but meaningful actions. Some organizations help people escape from the battlefield; others persist in defending political prisoners. In setting goals for the next five to 15 years, they focus on keeping activist networks alive, slowing the erosion of rights under state repression, and maximizing the chances for future reforms that could bring about a more transparent, accountable, and rights-respecting system.

Given this context, donors should:

• Prioritize long-term impact. Support should be provided to funding approaches that strengthen organizations’ resilience under authoritarian conditions, and that reward creative thinking under existing constraints, adhering to the organizations’ own assessments of what will lead to durable rather than short-lived gains.
• Apply a “money follows liveliness” principle. Donors should prioritize funding for those human rights subdomains that are currently the most active and socially responsive inside Russia due to lower levels of repression and high public engagement. In 2026, this is the environmental field, but the area of greatest activity may shift over time.
• Encourage “mushroom growth” in the human rights landscape. New funding should encourage further decentralization and the development of distributed networks of small cells inside Russia that are linked to infrastructure abroad, rather than concentrating support on a few large actors. Donors should expand the use of pass-through schemes, in which exiled or semi-exiled groups transfer resources to other organizations inside Russia that cannot access external funding directly.
• Promote cross-subdomain cooperation. Donors should incentivize collaboration between HR organizations from different fields and create opportunities for activists and volunteers to participate simultaneously in multiple initiatives. This could include joint workshops between the organizations of environmentalists and human rights defenders to promote mutual learning.

Some of the long-term impacts pursued by HR organizations can have a “meta” function, such as bolstered opportunities for collective action inside Russia. These efforts merit priority support, including:

• Civic hubs inside Russia. Support for fixed, low-threshold spaces in large and small cities will allow newcomers to enter activist networks, meet peers, and organically join civic initiatives.
• Regular, outwardly apolitical gathering formats. Funding for recurring events that let people spend time among like-minded peers, without additional political risk, would similarly reinforce and expand activist communities. As of 2026, letter-writing evenings for political prisoners are the dominant format of this type; if repression intensifies, HR organizations will shift to new formats with a similar social function.
• Initiatives that diminish the arbitrariness of repression. By defending those already targeted by the state and turning case-level insights into clear guidance for others, some HR organizations demystify how the repressive system works and equip activists to avoid its triggers. This clarity not only lowers individual risk but also enables bolder, more confident participation in collective action.

As state pressure on independent initiatives continues to rise and a hybrid mode of work becomes the long-term operating reality, donors should adapt their own practices accordingly, in particular by:

• Separating funding tracks for “legacy CSOs” and grassroots initiatives. Donors should maintain one stream for established HR organizations with standard requirements, and another that offers small, flexible “seed-type” grants to emerging groups with viable ideas and identifiable in-country beneficiaries. Funders should support coordination between these layers, while avoiding supervisory relationships that could deepen tensions.
• Avoiding overreliance on individual donations as a funding metric. Domestic donations to HR organizations in Russia are increasingly toxic or outright dangerous. The safer forms of support now come almost entirely from abroad. Prioritizing an increase in individual donations may unintentionally push HR organizations to shift attention away from their core missions inside Russia and toward the interests of the diaspora.
• Funding short-term respites abroad for in-country activists. To reduce burnout and professional attrition, donors should support brief restorative and educational trips to safer, visa-free locations (such as Moldova, Armenia, Montenegro, Serbia, or Turkey) rather than EU (European Union) or US destinations that create reentry risks. Mixing in-country and exiled activists on such retreats could also help reduce the widening divide between the two groups. Due to the risk of transnational repression, appropriate security protocols must be enacted even for the locations listed above.
• Providing individual microgrants for in-country activists. As human rights work inside Russia becomes more fragmented, precarious, and fraught with risk, donors should support activists directly with unrestricted funding, for example through six-month or one-year microgrants or stipends. Such support, with no attachment to specific deliverables, helps retain experienced activists, reduces pressure to exit the sector, and sustains civic engagement under increasingly constrained conditions.
• Further adapting compliance frameworks to hybrid and authoritarian contexts. As in the 2010s, when “undesirable organization” designations forced donors to shift to nonpublic support, comparable systemic changes are needed now. Donors should take account of the fact that supporting low-visibility work inside Russia often conflicts with the reporting, transparency, and compliance requirements shaped by EU and US regulations. Where legally possible, funding mechanisms should prioritize operational security and flexible accountability models that reduce exposure risks for both grantees and their in-country partners.

Continued support for the Russian human rights sector is not an act of charity but a strategic investment in the long-term security of democratic societies. It is one of the few realistic ways to increase the likelihood that Russia will eventually become a peaceful, democratic neighbor. This statement is grounded not in optimistic probability assessments, but in a concrete fact: HR organizations to date have continued their meaningful work in the face of dramatically escalating domestic and transnational repression. Such persistence matters.

The sector’s proven quality of democratic resilience is what international donors and recipient groups could tangibly sustain for Russia. Keeping civil society networks alive means preserving communities that understand democratic values, can build trust across divides, and recognize how authoritarian regimes corrode the societies they govern. No one can predict when, or whether, Russia’s political regime will change. But when the next window of opportunity opens, it is certain that prominent political actors will need to rely on a resilient, connected civil society to convert the opening into a durable push for democratization and help Russia confront—rather than reproduce—the legacies of its autocratic past.

The stakes extend beyond Russia. With democratic indices in continuous global decline and authoritarian regimes suppressing dissent across borders through transnational repression, the essential utility of exiled and semi-exiled civil society initiatives will only increase. They are already charting the future of resistance to authoritarian rule, and the world should be watching.

Appendix: Definitions and Data

We understand “human rights (HR) organizations” to mean nongovernmental entities whose primary mission is to promote and protect human rights as defined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international law, and which operate independently of governments and political parties, serving as watchdogs, advocates, and service providers.

This study defines “impact” as the most long-term and systemic dimension of the outputs–outcomes–impact continuum, understood primarily as durable changes in behavior and agency among individuals and target groups. The study does not attempt to provide an impact assessment, which is usually based on quantitative data. Instead, it seeks to reconstruct the action models through which HR organizations generate such effects inside Russia.

Our inquiry draws on:

1. 49 interviews with representatives of Russian exiled and semi-exiled HR organizations. This group included 33 senior managers responsible for Russia-based programs and 16 ground-level activists. Our research sought to capture the sector’s heterogeneity across several critical dimensions. The selected organizations varied in scale of operations, from small teams of three to five to larger entities with 50 to 60 staff members. They engaged diverse constituencies, ranging from major urban centers like Moscow and St. Petersburg to regions and ethnic republics. The selected organizations operate under different levels of state repression, with some officially designated as “extremist,” “undesirable,” or “foreign agents,” and others currently functioning without such proscriptive labels.

• 15 interviews with donors dealing with Russia-focused grant programs. The sample of donor organizations was designed to ensure diversity in terms of country of main location (United States, United Kingdom, and EU countries), type of support (core support or project-based programs), primary source of funding (state-related, international private, or Russian-rooted private donors).

• Supplementary materials, including secondary quantitative data collected by the authors from open sources, the datasets shared by interviewed organizations, and secondary data drawn from prior relevant studies.

About the Authors

Mikhail Komin

Mikhail Komin is a fellow with the Democratic Resilience program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a political scientist and Russia expert focusing on elites, the bureaucracy, government data, and the policymaking process.

Sam Greene

Prof. Sam Greene is a Nonresident Senior Fellow for the Democratic Resilience program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and Professor of Russian Politics at King’s College London (KCL).

Sam served as Director of CEPA’s Democratic Resilience Program from 2022 to 2025. Before that, Sam founded the Russia Institute at KCL, which he directed from 2012 to 2022. Before moving to London, he lived and worked for 13 years in Moscow, including as Director of the Center for the Study of New Media and Politics at the New Economic School and as Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. He is the author of Moscow in Movement: Power & Politics in Putin’s Russia (Stanford, 2014) and Putin v. the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia (Yale, 2019, with Graeme Robertson), as well as numerous academic and policy papers. An American and British citizen, Dr. Greene holds a PhD and MSc from the London School of Economics and a BSJ from Northwestern University and is an elected fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences.

Evgeny Roshchin

Dr. Evgeny Roshchin leads the Democratic Resilience program at CEPA and serves as a Visiting Scholar at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is the author of “Professorial Silence”, “Exit as Voice”, “Crime and Punishment in International Politics” and many other academic articles, and media commentaries.

Alexandra Yatsyk

Dr. Alexandra Yatsyk is a CEPA Russia Future Fellow, a researcher at the University of Lille, and an Adjunct Professor at Sciences Po, France. Her expertise covers identity-making in Eastern Europe and Russia, biopolitics, illiberalism, and memory. She served as a researcher in Europe and USA, including the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu, Polish Academy of Sciences, Uppsala Institute of Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Warsaw, Vienna Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, and others. She co-authored the Critical biopolitics of the Post-Soviet: from Population to Nation (Lexington, 2019), Lotman’s Cultural Semiotics and the Political (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), and co-edited New and Old Vocabularies of International Relations After the Ukraine Crisis (Routledge, 2016), Boris Nemtsov and Russian Politics: Power and Resistance (Ibidem Verlag & Columbia University, 2018), and others.

Acknowledgments

The authors are indebted to the representatives of Russian civil society organizations and international donor institutions who agreed to participate in the study and shared detailed insights into their work. The author is grateful to CEPA staff members Christopher Walker, Michael Newton, David Kagan, Isabella Nieminen, and Talia Martin, whose editorial and production support were invaluable elements of the release of this report. The author thanks the Russia Program at George Washington University, the Cedar research team, including Alesya Sokolova and Arnold Khachaturov, and several other colleagues who chose to remain anonymous for providing some of the data used in this report.

CEPA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, public policy institution. All opinions expressed are those of the author(s) alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.

1. Igor Gretskiy, Is There Life in the Desert? Russian Civil Society After the Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine (Tallinn: International Centre for Defence and Security, May 2023), https://icds.ee/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2023/05/ICDS_Report_Is_There_Life_in_the_Desert_Igor_Gretskiy_May_2023.pdf; and Igor Gretskiy, Not Quite Agents of Change: Russian Anti-War Grassroots Initiatives in Europe (Tallinn: International Centre for Defence and Security, October 2025), https://icds.ee/static/icds_report_not_quite_agents_of_change_igor_gretskiy_october_2025.pdf . [↩]
2. Stefan Ingvarsson and Ekaterina Kalinina, Is Civil Society Still Alive in Russia? (Stockholm: Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies, September 2024), https://sceeus.se/publikationer/is-civil-society-still-alive-in-russia/; Maria Chiara Franceschelli, “One Step Ahead of the Dictator: OVD-Info and the Rebuilding of Russian Civil Society,” Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia), July 19, 2023, https://www.ponarseurasia.org/one-step-ahead-of-the-dictator-ovd-info-and-the-rebuilding-of-russian-civil-society/; Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Maria Snegovaya, Supporting Russian Civil Society (Washington: Center for a New American Security, December 2022), https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/supporting-russian-civil-society; and Vlada Baranova et al., Solidarity Under Repression: A Comprehensive Study of the Russian Civil Society in 2024(Hannah Arendt Research Center, 2025), https://www.tharesearch.center/solidarity-under-repression. [↩]
3. “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” The White House, January 20, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/reevaluating-and-realigning-united-states-foreign-aid/. [↩]
4. Margarita Zavadskaya and Mikhail Turchenko, “The Russian Opposition in the Eyes of Russians in Russia and Abroad: The Case of the Anti-Corruption Foundation,” Riddle, August 29, 2024, https://ridl.io/ru/rossijskaya-oppozitsiya-glazami-rossiyan-v-rossii-i-za-ee-predelami-fbk/; Margarita Zavadskaya and Mikhail Turchenko, “The Russian Opposition in the Eyes of Russians in Russia and Abroad: Mikhail Khodorkovsky,” Riddle, February 5, 2025, https://ridl.io/ru/rossijskaya-oppozitsiya-glazami-rossiyan-v-rossii-i-za-ee-predelami-mihail-hodorkovskij/; and Steve Gutterman, “Who’s Who in the Fractured Russian Opposition Fighting Against Putin,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), October 9, 2025, https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-opposition-exile-figures-factions-putin-navalny/33555227.html; Philippe C. Schmitter, Some Propositions About Civil Society and the Consolidation of Democracy (Vienna: Institut für Höhere Studien, September 1993), https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/handle/document/26763; For comparison see Igor Gretskiy, Not Quite Agents of Change: Russian Anti-War Grassroots Initiatives in Europe (Tallinn: International Centre for Defence and Security, October 2025), https://icds.ee/static/icds_report_not_quite_agents_of_change_igor_gretskiy_october_2025.pdf . [↩]
5. Some of these organizations were affected by the 2025 donor crisis and had to reduce their activities. One such example is theorganization Vyvozhuk. “‘Мы очень устали’ Проект ‘Вывожук’ помогал эвакуировать из России людей, которых преследуют по политическим мотивам. Теперь эта программа закрыта. Мы выяснили у них почему [‘We’re very tired.’ The project ‘Vyvozhuk’ helped evacuate people persecuted for political reasons from Russia. Now the program is closed. We found out why], Meduza, December 16, 2025, https://meduza.io/feature/2025/12/16/finansy-ne-edinstvennaya-problema-my-ochen-ustali. [↩]
6.  Vlada Baranova et al., Solidarity Under Repression: A Comprehensive Study of the Russian Civil Society in 2024 (Hannah Arendt Research Center, 2025), https://www.tharesearch.center/solidarity-under-repression. [↩]
7. The following interview excerpts describe this development: (1) “We help people reassure themselves that they are not alone, that there are many others like them—‘normal’ [antiwar, democratic] people, not the ‘marginals’ propaganda says they are.” (2) “[S]taying silent is the safest option […], but when you stay silent you still need to know that others are also silent in the same defiant way. In reality they are not silent, they are quietly doing something.” (3) “[O]ur platform and volunteering with us gives them a sense of community, a sense that they are not alone.” [↩]
8. Data collection was conducted in two stages using open Telegram sources. First, we manually compiled a list of all relevant Telegram channels that contained references to solidarity events on behalf of political prisoners. This list combined an initial set provided to us by an activist working on this topic with additional channels identified through keyword searches in Telegram Premium. Second, we downloaded all posts from these channels via the Telegram API using the Python library Telethon. From this corpus, posts related to letter-writing events were identified with the help of the Gemini-2.0-flash language model, which was also used to extract additional indicators such as location, event date, online/offline format, and the presence of a specific address. The resulting dataset was then selectively reviewed by hand to verify relevance and the accuracy of the model-generated information. [↩]
9.  “В Екатеринбурге силовики по доносу местной провластной активистки сорвали вечер писем политзаключенным” [In Yekaterinburg, security forces, acting on a tip from a local progovernment activist, disrupted an evening of letters to political prisoners], Mediazona, May 25, 2025, https://zona.media/news/2025/05/25/ekb; and Alesya Sokolova, “Вы еще кутите? Тогда мы идем к вам” [Are you still partying? Then we’re coming to you], Novaya Gazeta Europe, November 13, 2024, https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/11/13/vy-eshche-kutite-togda-my-idem-k-vam. [↩]
10. “You Are Not Alone: Marathon in Support of Political Prisoners,” https://june12.io/. [↩]
11.  Zaodno Mutual Aid Platform, https://zaodno.org/. [↩]
12. “Кто против войны. Все открытые письма с призывами остановить вторжение в Украину” [Who’s against the war? All open letters calling for an end to the invasion of Ukraine], Mediazona, February 27, 2022, https://zona.media/article/2022/02/27/vse. [↩]
13. See, for example, the organization Peace unto All (https://www.mir-vsem.info/), which accumulates and organizes support for antiwar priests, or the organization Gold Key (https://zolotoykluchik.org/), which helps women and feminist activists. [↩]
14. Dan Storyev, “The Genius of the ‘Noon Against Putin’ Protest,” The Spectator, March 19, 2024, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/russias-opposition-must-now-play-the-long-game/;  Paul Sonne et al., “A Collective ‘No’: Anti-Putin Russians Embrace an Unlikely Challenger,” The New York Times, January 27, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/27/world/europe/russia-putin-election-boris-nadezhdin.html. [↩]
15. “У приемной Путина выстраивались в очередь до 1000 недовольных. Это одна из крупнейших акций с весны 2024 года” [Up to 1,000 disgruntled protesters lined up outside Putin’s reception office. This is one of the largest protests since the spring of 2024], Agentstvo News, Telegram, September 27, 2025, https://t.me/agentstvonews/12131;  “В Москве зоозащитники подают обращения против новых законопроектов Госдумы: один из них запрещает кормить бездомных животных на улице” [In Moscow, animal rights activists are filing petitions against new State Duma bills: one of them bans feeding stray animals on the street], SOTAvision, Telegram, October 25, 2025, https://t.me/sotavisionmedia/52070; “В Москве зоозащитники подают обращения против новых законопроектов Госдумы: один из них запрещает кормить бездомных животных на улице” [In Moscow, animal rights activists are filing petitions against new State Duma bills: one of them bans feeding stray animals on the street], SOTAvision, Telegram, October 25, 2025, https://t.me/sotavisionmedia/52070. [↩]
16. “Десятки человек пришли к приемной администрации президента в Москве, чтобы подать обращение с требованием освободить музыкантов группы ‘Стоптайм’ [Dozens of people came to the presidential administration’s reception office in Moscow to submit a petition demanding the release of the Stoptime musicians], Meduza, October 25, 2025, https://meduza.io/news/2025/10/25/desyatki-chelovek-prishli-k-priemnoy-administratsii-prezidenta-v-moskve-chtoby-podat-obraschenie-s-trebovaniem-osvobodit-muzykantov-gruppy-stoptaym. [↩]
17. For coverage see Masha Gessen, “The Ukrainians Forced to Flee to Russia,” The New Yorker, August 14, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/21/the-ukrainians-forced-to-flee-to-russia; or Anton Starikov, “The Russian Anti-War Volunteers Who Defied Threats and Helped Ukrainians Flee,” RFE/RL, January 9, 2024, https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-antiwar-volunteers-ukraine-aid-threats-escape/32767064.html. [↩]
18. “Persecution of the Anti-War Movement Report: Three Years into Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine,” OVD-Info, February 2025, https://ovd.info/en/antiwar_3_years. [↩]
19. “Law Enforcement Versus Human Rights Defenders: How the Russian State Persecutes Human Rights Defenders,” OVD-Info, November 8, 2024, https://reports.ovd.info/en/law-enforcement-versus-human-rights-defenders-how-russian-state-persecutes-human-rights; and “Кабмин одобрил поправки об ужесточении требований к адвокату” [The cabinet of ministers approved amendments to tighten requirements for laywers], Pravo.ru, December 11, 2023, https://pravo.ru/news/250344/. [↩]
20. Katerina Gordeeva, “Valentina Melnikova: ‘If People Don’t Want to Help Themselves, Nothing Can Be Done for Them,’” Tell Gordeeva, YouTube, September 29, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWoChmyeWX0. [↩]
21. Natalya Polytsya, “Право уклониться” [Right to evade], Novaya Gazeta Europe, October 1, 2025, https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2025/10/01/pravo-uklonitsia; and “About the Project ‘I Want to Live,’” Hochyzhit.com, https://hochuzhit.com/en/. [↩]
22. Mariana Katzarova, Situation of Human Rights in the Russian Federation: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Russian Federation (Geneva: UN Human Rights Council, September 2025), https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session60/advance-version/a-hrc-60-59-aev.pdf; Egor Feoktistov, “Под грузом ‘пятисотых’” [Under the weight of Cargo 500], IStories, May 20, 2025, https://istories.media/stories/2025/05/20/pod-gruzom-pyatisotikh/. [↩]
23. “Единый реестр воинского учета” [Unified register of military registration], TAdviser, September 1, 2025, https://www.tadviser.ru/index.php/%D0%A1%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8C%D1%8F:%D0%95%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80_%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE_%D1%83%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B0; and “Для определения места жительства призывников в Москве используют систему видеонаблюдения” [A video surveillance system is being used to determine the residence of conscripts in Moscow], TASS, April 17, 2023, https://tass.ru/obschestvo/17546275. [↩]
24. See for example “Онлайн-этап хакатона get_lost ->>> присоединяйся из любой точки мира (кроме РФ)” [Get_lost hackathon online stage—join from anywhere in the world (except Russia)], Idite Lesom, Telegram, September 22, 2025, https://t.me/iditelesom_help/6235. [↩]
25. In June 2025, law enforcement agencies shut down one such civic hub, the Revolt Center in Komi Republic, confiscating equipment and opening cases against its staff. Local activists noted that the intent was not only to close the space, but also to discourage other hubs by signaling that even semipublic civic venues would be treated as politically suspect. See “‘Шер-Хан пришел, за ним подтянулись шакалы’” [‘Shere Khan has come, and the jackals have followed him’], Novaya Gazeta Europe, July 13, 2025, https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2025/07/13/sher-khan-prishel-za-nim-podtianulis-shakaly. [↩]
26. Angelina Davydova, “Grünes Schlupfloch” [Green loophole], Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft, September 13, 2024, https://www.ipg-journal.de/rubriken/wirtschaft-und-oekologie/artikel/gruenes-schlupfloch-7768/. [↩]
27. Among the international environmental organizations designated as “undesirable” in Russia in 2023 were the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace Russia, the Wild Salmon Center, Bellona, and several others. [↩]
28. “Обзор за 2022 год” [2022 review], Ecological Crisis Group, May 27, 2023, https://help-eco.info/ehrd2022/. [↩]
29. Some studies indicate that only about one-third of environmental NGOs avoided taking state-linked funding or participating in joint projects with governmental or quasi-governmental structures after 2022. See Russian Analytical Digest no. 324, February 28, 2025, https://css.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/cis/center-for-securities-studies/pdfs/russiananalyticaldigest-324.pdf. [↩]
30. “Оценки изменений, произошедших в различных сферах жизни в 2024 году” [Assessment of changes that occurred in various spheres of life in 2024], Levada-Center, February 5, 2025, https://www.levada.ru/2025/02/05/otsenki-izmenenij-proizoshedshih-v-razlichnyh-sferah-zhizni-v-2024-godu/. [↩]
31. Darya Talanova, “ЖКХ вместо ФБК” [Housing and communal services instead of Anti-Corruption Foundation], Novaya Gazeta Europe, June 16, 2025, https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2025/06/16/zhkkh-vmesto-fbk; “Life After Death: Russian Civil Society Under Conditions of War and Dictatorship,” Re: Russia, March 25, 2025, https://re-russia.net/en/analytics/0269/. [↩]
32. See the list of such “eco-victories” here: “ЭКОПОБЕДЫ-2023” [Eco-victories-2023], Ecological Crisis Group, June 17, 2024, https://help-eco.info/victories2023/. [↩]
33. The list of “victories” only increased over the last two years. “Экопобеды в 2024” [Eco-victories in 2024], Ecological Crisis Group, January 15, 2026, https://help-eco.info/victories2024/. [↩]
34. Interviewees described the inability to reach emerging activist cohorts in the following terms: (1) “New problems brought new people, and in the past they would have come to [organization name] for support—now they are afraid to.” (2) “Word of mouth no longer reaches the fresh groups of activists, and we can’t publicly tell them that we work inside Russia.” [↩]
35. “Поддержите фигурантов ‘баймакского дела’” [Support the defendants in the ‘Baymak case’], OVD-Info, https://baymak.help/;  “Острова сопротивления: как российские регионы пытаются противостоять отмене местного самоуправления” [Islands of resistance: How Russian regions are trying to resist the abolition of local self-government], Re: Russia, July 11, 2025, https://re-russia.net/analytics/0321/. [↩]
36. “Тысячи волонтеров уже две недели спасают побережье Черного моря и животных от мазута. Вот что они рассказывают” [Thousands of volunteers have been saving the Black Sea coast and animals from fuel oil for two weeks now. Here’s what they’re saying], Meduza, December 30, 2024, https://meduza.io/feature/2024/12/30/tysyachi-volonterov-uzhe-dve-nedeli-spasayut-poberezhie-chernogo-morya-i-zhivotnyh-ot-mazuta-vot-chto-oni-rasskazyvayut. [↩]
37. “Проект #МЫВМЕСТE” [Project #WeTogether], Dobro.ru, https://xn--b1agazb5ah1e.xn--p1ai/help_sea. [↩]
38. “‘Случится ли захват ФБК, теперь во многом зависит от нового директора. Я желаю ему удачи’” [Whether the FBK takeover will happen now depends largely on the new director. I wish him luck], Meduza, September 1, 2025. https://meduza.io/feature/2025/09/01/sluchitsya-li-zahvat-fbk-teper-vo-mnogom-zavisit-ot-novogo-direktora-ya-zhelayu-emu-udachi. [↩]
39. “ФСБ опубликовала список из 172 организаций. Они якобы являются ‘структурными поздразделениями’ признанного террористическим ‘Форума свободных государств постРоссии’ [The Federal Security Service has published a list of 172 organizations. They are allegedly ‘structural subdivisions’ of the terrorist-designated ‘Forum of Free States of Post-Russia’], Doxa, January 13, 2025, https://doxa.team/news/2025-01-13-fsb; and Sofya Kanevskaya, “‘Землячка просила, чтобы я отговорил ее сына идти добровольцем на войну’” [‘A fellow countrywoman asked me to dissuade her son from volunteering for the war’], Novaya Gazeta Europe, May 17, 2025, https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2025/05/17/zemliachka-prosila-chtoby-ia-otgovoril-ee-syna-idti-dobrovoltsem-na-voinu. [↩]
40.  “‘Они работают на благо верхушки.’ Как Ассоциация коренных малочисленных народов стала инструментом обогащения и лоббизма” [‘They work for the benefit of the elite.’ How the Association of Indigenous Minorities became a tool for enrichment and lobbying], Verstka, August 2, 2024, https://verstka.media/rassledovanie-kak-associaciya-korennyh-malochislennyh-narodov-stala-instrumentom-obogascheniya-i-lobbizma; and “ICIPR at the Arctic Circle Rome Forum: Russian Disinformation in the Arctic,” ICIPR, March 18, 2026, https://icipr.international/archives/1356. [↩]