How the Collapse of Russia’s Opposition Is Reshaping Israeli Politics

There is a particular kind of loss that has no ceremony. No date you can point to and say: this is when it ended. When Alexei Navalny died in a Russian Arctic prison colony in February 2024, we had that date. We had grief in a recognizable form. What is happening this week, as the Anti-Corruption Foundation he built tears itself apart in public, is the other kind. The slow, quiet realization that what you were waiting for is not coming. That the waiting itself was the last thing holding a certain version of your life together.

I have been in Israel since the war began. I was already abroad in February 2022 and made the decision not to return to Russia. I am one of over 83,000 who made aliyah since the invasion, joining a Russian-speaking community that already numbered around 1.3 million, roughly 15 percent of Israel’s population. Most of us arrived with the quiet assumption that this was provisional. That the opposition would succeed. That we would go back. That assumption is now dying.

This week, former FBK director Ivan Zhdanov gave a major interview to journalist Irina Shikhman, published May 10, accusing the foundation’s leadership of abandoning its founding principle — don’t lie and don’t steal — and alleging fictitious employees maintained for the personal benefit of political director Leonid Volkov. FBK presenter Irina Alleman had resigned days earlier citing a toxic internal culture. Former executive director Vladimir Ashurkov gave a three-hour interview addressing questions about oligarch money. Yulia Navalnaya, who now leads the organization, called it all “a real shock.” For those of us watching from Israel, shock is not quite the word. The word is closer to confirmation. The FBK was not an institution. It was a man. And the man is gone.

Here is what is not being discussed: when a community loses its reason to return home, it does not simply grieve and move on. It redirects. The civic energy, the political instinct, the trained habit of caring intensely about public life — all of it transfers. The 2022 wave of Russian immigrants arrived in Israel carrying an unusually high concentration of exactly that energy. These were not primarily economic migrants. They were people who left because they believed in something. Journalists, lawyers, activists, academics — people who had spent years inside a political movement, donating to the FBK, attending anti-war protests outside the Russian embassy in Tel Aviv in February 2022, writing Navalny’s name on their ballot papers during the 2024 Russian presidential election held at the Tel Aviv consulate as a last act of defiance. That movement is now over. And the energy has to go somewhere.

For the older waves of Russian aliyah, Israel’s political home was largely the right. Yisrael Beiteinu was built on the secular Russian-speaking immigrant base — hard-line on security, skeptical of concessions. The 2022 cohort is different. These are people who opposed Putin partly because they opposed authoritarianism itself: the concentration of power, the attack on courts, the criminalization of dissent. When they arrived in Israel and watched Netanyahu’s coalition move against the Supreme Court in 2023, the pattern felt familiar. The instinct activated. Russian-speaking voices began appearing in protest movements, civil society organizations, media, and political conversations. The provisional address was becoming a permanent one, faster than almost anyone anticipated — and now, with the FBK’s collapse confirming there is no Russia to return to, that process is accelerating dramatically.

This is, in one sense, a gain for Israel. Educated, politically experienced, civically motivated people investing themselves fully in Israeli life. But there is a harder question embedded in this that Israeli public conversation has barely begun to ask. Political instinct that travels from one conflict to another does not always translate cleanly. The battle for Israeli democracy is real, but it sits inside seventy-five years of security complexity that has no equivalent in Moscow. Nothing in the political formation of a Russian liberal prepared them for October 7, 2023, when Hamas massacred approximately 1,200 people in a single morning — the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust. That event reshuffled every political category in Israel. It demands to be understood on its own terms, from within this society’s specific history, and not through a framework calibrated for a different country’s fight against a different kind of enemy.

I notice, among people who arrived when I did, a tendency to apply a political map from elsewhere onto territory it does not quite fit. The Israeli left can feel immediately legible to someone who spent years opposing Russian authoritarianism, the language of civil rights, judicial independence, minority protections. What can get lost in translation is the weight of what this country has lived through, and lives through, in a way that has no analogue in our experience. This is not a reason to disengage. It is a reason to listen before concluding. The Russian-Israeli community is becoming a permanent force in this country’s civic life. The question of whether that force will be shaped by a genuine reckoning with where we have arrived or by the certainty of people who believe they have already seen this story before is not a small one. We fled a country where people in power stopped listening to reality a long time ago. We should be careful not to bring that habit with us.