The Frontline
RKSL
Nov 3, 2025
The Russian campaign to persuade the West of “good Russians” has intensified. It presents exiles and opposition figures as dissidents, as victims of Putin, as if their visibility proves that another Russia exists. They are placed on panels, quoted in newspapers, invited to speak as moral authorities. Yet whenever the discussion turns to sanctions, reparations, or responsibility, their arguments serve not to dismantle Russia’s imperial inheritance but to protect it.
For Russians, a change of regime has never altered the core of the state. From czarist to Bolshevik to Putinist, the empire has remained the constant. Every flag, anthem, and ideology has served the same goal: to preserve domination. Even when power collapses, it reorganizes around that single idea. The empire must survive. That is why the myth of the “good Russian” is being promoted so relentlessly, to prepare the West to accept a cosmetic transition as moral renewal. If Putin and his circle fall, and the so-called good Russians replace them, the world will be told that redemption has arrived. It will not have. It will be the same Russia, vicious, bloodthirsty, genocidal.
Yulia Navalna is celebrated as the conscience of Russia. Yet she opposes sanctions. She opposes the use of frozen Russian assets for the reconstruction of Ukraine. She opposes accountability for the devastation inflicted by her state. Each of these positions shields Russia from consequence.
The tone is polished, but the meaning is unchanged from the Kremlin’s own demands: preserve Russian wealth, preserve Russian power, preserve the state from justice. And that’s the point.
The same posture runs through the thousands who fled westward when sanctions touched their comforts. They settled in Berlin, Paris, New York. They did not fill the streets demanding the dismantling of empire. They did not call for an end to the genocidal war against Ukrainians. They live comfortably, enjoying freedoms they never fought for at home, couldn’t be bothered to fight for at home, while missiles level Kharkiv, Odesa, and Mykolaiv. They whine that they would be arrested if they demonstrate. But Ukrainians have fought fiercely for their freedom during the Maidans, during the Revolution of Dignity and now, during the yet another Russian genocide against Ukrainians. Too often these self-styled anti-putinistas have not even been neutral to Ukraine’s fight for democracy but actively hostile. There are repeated cases of Russians abroad harassing Ukrainians, even assaulting refugees who escaped only to save their children’s lives.
The West still clings to the illusion that Russia’s crimes belong to one man. Remove him, it is said, and the problem will vanish. But Putin is not the one raping Ukrainian women and girls. He is not the one torturing and castrating Ukrainian men, murdering civilians, or kidnapping children. These acts are carried out by ordinary Russians, soldiers from Perm, Irkutsk, and Ryazan, men who choose to brutalize, to steal, to execute villagers. The war is sustained not by
one ruler but by a society that has long relished the role of colonizer and treated conquest as birthright.
The opposition abroad quarrels with Putin but not with empire. It seeks sympathy while rejecting reparations, claiming the posture of victim while denying justice to those who have endured Russian aggression. It asks for absolution while rejecting accountability.
They are part of a long tradition telling the same story, century after century. The deportations, starvations, executions, and now missiles and mass graves were never the work of a single despot. They were the work of Russia itself, repeated generation after generation by millions who accepted autocracy and invasion as natural law. Until the empire is dismantled and Russia pays for what it has done, no Russian voice can claim moral standing. The name of the ruler has never mattered. Only the empire has.