The other Russia that is not
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe created its Platform for Dialogue with Russian democratic forces in exile to give voice to “the other Russia” – those who reject the war and represent a democratic alternative to Vladimir Putin’s regime. Two sessions in, the platform’s record raises serious questions about whether that “other Russia” exists in the form European institutions have assumed.
June 23, 2026 -
Beka Iromashvili
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Hot TopicsIssue 4 2026Magazine
Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Council of Europe faced an immediate question: what to do with the democratic, civil society, and human rights infrastructure it had spent decades cultivating inside Russia.
Photo: olrat / Shutterstock
Since its establishment in October 2025, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s (PACE) Platform for Dialogue with Russian democratic forces in exile has now completed both its winter and spring sessions. The PACE President Petra Bayr delivered the opening address in classical European institutional rhetoric. She declared that Europe has not forgotten Russians who oppose the war and the regime, that it “supports those Russians who oppose the war of aggression, who respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and – let me underline that – who accept responsibility for the harm inflicted by their state.” The last clause, on collective responsibility, is the most revealing. It names precisely the condition the Russian opposition in exile has not genuinely met and the one western institutions continue to treat as self-evidently satisfied.
After those sessions, the gap between the platform’s stated ambitions and its actual composition is difficult to ignore, raising serious questions about whether it risks becoming a vehicle for an agenda misaligned with, or at worst directed against, European priorities. To understand how this came about, it is necessary to start with what the platform was originally designed to be.
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Council of Europe, PACE, Russian opposition
