This anti-war politician just fled Russia. He believes Putin knows the war is costing him support

By Clare Sebastian, CNN

Paris (CNN) — Boris Nadezhdin struck a tired, yet still upbeat figure when we met on a blisteringly hot day in Paris. He’d been in France just over a week, still reeling from his hasty exit from Russia after a sudden summons from Russia’s powerful Investigative Committee on what he assumed would be criminal charges.

After 40 years in Russian politics, he said he’d realized it was “a question of three days” before he might not have the choice to leave. “Normally, after you go to this place, you will receive the criminal paper and go to the court, and after court, go to jail: Lefortovo,” he explained, referring to Moscow’s most notorious prison, known for its brutal treatment of dissidents and political prisoners.

He checked his phone several times during the interview for updates from his lawyers.

He left his family in Russia, and on the day we met he missed his daughter’s wedding. But he’s managing to stay positive. “The good news is, I am alive and I am free,” he said.

Many other opposition figures in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia have been less fortunate.

A sudden exit

Just a month ago, Nadezhdin was running a campaign for Russian parliamentary elections in September. Then came a short but brutal series of interventions by the authorities.

First, on July 10, he was declared a “foreign agent,” a designation that, among many other restrictions, meant he wouldn’t be able to serve in parliament. When he announced that he would continue campaigning regardless, he found himself arrested on an administrative charge – accused of displaying extremist symbols, a claim he described as ridiculous. On July 17, he received a small fine.

A day earlier, he had received a message on his government services account – an online portal Russians use for everything from healthcare to speeding fines – that he had been banned from leaving the country.

Three days later, the summons arrived from the Investigative Committee, Russia’s top law-enforcement body, and the day after that, he says, the ban on leaving Russia “disappeared” from his online account. He believes this may have been a deliberate signal, and it enabled him to travel without being challenged.

“When the Kremlin administration want that opposition politician… to leave the country, number one they give him the criminal investigation… and second, they open the way to leave Russia.”

Rising dissent

Nadezhdin, an academic and former member of parliament in Russia in the early 2000s, and until recently a municipal lawmaker in his hometown of Dolgoprudny, just outside Moscow, had gained international fame when he attempted to challenge Putin in the 2024 presidential election, running on a manifesto that described the war in Ukraine as a “fatal mistake.”

His effort to gather the required 100,000 signatures sparked an outpouring of public support, with people lining up outside his campaign offices in cities across Russia and beyond in a rare burst of organized dissent in a country that continues to systematically stamp out political opposition.

In the end, he was barred from running when Russian election authorities ruled that enough of the signatures he’d collected were invalid to put him below the threshold.

But despite increasing obstacles, including a bankruptcy case against him that led, he says, to the loss of his home, he pushed on, driven by the sense that more and more Russians were getting behind his anti-war message.

“We have found from the beginning of this year the deep changes in public opinion in Russia,” he said. “Everybody wants to stop the war. It’s in the society, it’s in the elite and in the nearest people around Putin. And of course, the understanding of what this war really means for Russian economy, for Russian cities.”

At the same time, strikingly in a country where state media has instilled in Russians the idea that Ukraine and the West are to blame for the war, Putin’s approval rating is also dropping (albeit from a high level), according to various Russian polling organizations.

Nadezhdin believes those around Putin, and the Russian president himself, understand that “the only way to return the big support of people now… is to stop the war.”

When and how that understanding translates into action, he doesn’t know, and he’s not optimistic about a durable settlement.

“It’s quite possible to freeze the future strikes, mutual strikes. But the question of how to be in peace with West, be in peace with Ukraine, it’s a question of next generations.”

A renewed crackdown

In the face of declining approval ratings, the Kremlin is reverting to more repressive tactics. Just this week, Russia’s supreme court blocked Yabloko, the only remaining liberal, anti-war party on the ballot for parliamentary elections, from running. Dozens of young Russians gathered outside the court in solidarity as the decision came in.

“The political system has exposed itself,” wrote Yabloko co-founder Grigory Yavlinsky on his Telegram channel. “It’s clear, the desire for peace and freedom turned out to be much stronger than the authorities had thought.”

Yabloko, which dates back to the early 1990s, has survived about as long in Russian politics as Nadezhdin, each weathering brutal pressure tactics, but allowed to remain as long as they didn’t gain too much support. Nadezhdin’s ouster now is all the more notable because he had tried to stick to the rules.

“I am not the strong enemy of the system like Nemtsov or like Navalny,” he told CNN, referring to two of Putin’s most charismatic opponents: Boris Nemtsov, who was gunned down near the Kremlin in 2015, and Aleksey Navalny, who died in a remote Russian penal colony in 2024.

“I didn’t cross the red lines for 40 years of my political biography and 20 years, 25 years practically in opposition. I was integrated in the Russian political system,” Nadezhdin said.

Those red lines were, he believed, never criticizing Putin personally (though he did criticize his policies, in particular the war in Ukraine) and never accepting funding from abroad.

”The red lines have changed and now, in Russia, it’s absolutely impossible to criticize war.”

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