“Stop Putin! Stop the war! Free political prisoners!”
These are the demands that Russian opposition leaders will take to their rally in Berlin on Sunday. The plan is to march to the Russian Embassy near Brandenburg Gate, in a march co-organized by prominent Kremlin critics Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, who were released from Russian custody in a dramatic prisoner exchange last August.
Yulia Navalnaya, widow of the prominent opposition leader Alexei Navalny, will also be there. Since his death in a Russian prison in February, Navalnaya has sought to take on a more public role to continue her late husband’s work.
Will protesters carry Russia’s flag?
In Russia, those who protest the country’s war in Ukraine risk long prison sentences. The only demonstrations against Russia’s ongoing full-scale invasion took place in early 2022, shortly after the war began. Soon after, legislative restrictions were considerably tightened.
Members of the Russian opposition living abroad don’t face this issue, but they have been accused of not being visible enough. Many Ukrainian activists in Europe, and especially in Germany, who regularly take a stand against Russia’s war have asked why the Russian war opponents aren’t out making their voices heard.
Ahead of Sunday’s protest, a dispute has unfolded on social media over whether protesters will be able to carry the Russian flag through Berlin. The protest announcement features images of a 2014 rally in Moscow opposing Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. At the time, protesters waved Russian and Ukrainian flags together.
But critics have said Russia’s colors have since been discredited by the country’s brutal war. “War criminals and accomplices have marched under this flag,” said Kseniya Larina, a journalist who left Russia before the war.
Political scientist Alexander Kynev doesn’t agree. He said that imposing additional conditions on protest participants, whether regarding flags, music or clothing, will only mean lower attendance and lead to “divisions.”
Parts of the Russian opposition have taken to carrying a white-blue-white flag, to distinguish themselves from Russia’s national white-blue-red tricolor. Yashin, co-organizer of Sunday’s rally, said they would not regulate the matter.
“We’re leaving the [flag topic] aside, it’s not important,” he told DW, adding that President Vladimir Putin did not hold the rights to Russia’s flag.
Two camps in Russia’s exiled opposition
But the flag furor is just one example of the fractured Russian opposition-in-exile, which has rallied behind different leaders. One group supports Navalnaya and her late husband’s prominent project, the Russian Anti-Corruption Foundation, which releases elaborately produced documentaries on YouTube and other social platforms to inform Russian citizens about Putin and the war in Ukraine.
Others have gathered around Russian tycoon-turned-opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent 10 years in a Russian prison camp.
Both groups are competing for leadership, and have taken to organizing their own protest events. In early November, Navalnaya held a forum in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, while at the same time, the Russian Anti-War Committee, of which Khodorkovsky is a member, held a conference in Berlin.
Looking to Iran’s opposition for inspiration
Yashin hopes Sunday’s rally will help smooth over old quarrels.
“The situation in the opposition is not easy. I’m not calling for consolidation lightly — there are deficits. There are many conflicts within the opposition, and competition isn’t always conducted fairly,” he admitted. “What’s unclear, however, is why.”
But Dmitry Gudkov, a former lawmaker and now opposition activist, cautioned that people shouldn’t take the lack of unity too seriously. “There is no room for a real power struggle,” he said. He added that as soon as something was at stake, he was sure political opponents within Russia’s opposition would gather “at a round table.”
While Khodorkovsky did express support for the upcoming rally in an interview the German tabloid newspaper Bild, he also complained about what he sees as insufficient coordination.
Yashin would have liked to avoid such discontent — instead, he wants the Berlin demonstration to lend a voice to those in Russia who are against the war and “are being gagged.” He said that’s why the organizers agreed to put forward uncontroversial central demands, such as putting Putin on trial.
The future of the Russian opposition remains uncertain. “It seems to me that nobody has a plan,” Navalnaya said in a recent interview with the independent Russian TV channel Dozhd. “If someone had a plan, we all would have accepted and implemented it,” she added.
“We’re looking to the experience of the Iranian opposition,” Yashin said. “They organized protests under similar conditions with 50,000 participants.” Since then, he argued, they’d been recognized as a “political force.”
This article was originally written in German.
