In a small corner of the disintegrating Soviet Union, a young Shakespearean actor named Akhmed Zakayev stepped off the stage and took up arms.
Zakayev, like many Chechens, had been hopeful when the USSR collapsed. A new state had been declared in the capital of Grozny almost immediately, inspired by the massive and peaceful popular uprisings across the ex-Soviet satellite states: the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria.
But Moscow wasn’t keen to lose any more territory. In 1994, tanks rolled Grozny and asserted that the republic was no more: Chechnya was a member of the new Russian Federation. That’s when Zakayev joined the resistance.
Thirty years later, Zakayev is the prime minister of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria’s government-in-exile.
“I couldn’t have imagined that my fate would become what it is today,” Zakayev told Foreign Policy during an interview in Kyiv this spring. “We’ve experienced a lot of tragedy, a lot of bloodshed, a lot of violence since 1994, when we became the victims of Russian aggression.”
For three decades, across two brutal wars waged against the Chechens, Zakayev has tried to convince the world to back his nation’s independence. He has not had much luck: Although the republic was once recognized by Georgia and Afghanistan, no nation currently explicitly recognizes its status as the government of Chechnya.
Today, many of Russia’s separatists, including Zakayev, see enormous opportunity in Ukraine’s struggle for self-defense against Moscow’s aggression. They have supported the resistance both in spirit and by joining Ukraine’s fight. This has led to an extraordinary partnership—not just with Kyiv, but also among the various dissidents hoping to be free from the Russian Federation.
Together, they believe they can bring about the end of President Vladimir Putin—and Russia itself.
The drab boardroom in which I met Zakayev, in Kyiv, is a fairly recent home for the Chechen separatists. On the table before us were the green, red, and white flag of the Republic of Ichkeria; the Ukrainian bicolor, and the European Union flag. Along the wall behind Zakayev were rows of portraits of past Chechen leaders—and the dates of their deaths, usually at Russia’s hands.
“The fact is that, for over 30 years, the world has simply been watching the Chechen tragedy,” Zakayev said. “They have simply been watching as we were being murdered, as we were being forced to leave the country, as we were being scattered across the world.”
Since the 1990s, the official U.S. position on the conflict has been simple: “We consider Chechnya a part of Russia.” That position only hardened when Washington began describing Chechnya’s paramilitary opposition to Russian rule as a movement that was affiliated with al Qaeda. Terror attacks committed against Russia in the name of the Chechen resistance have only made a change in U.S. policy more unlikely, even if serious doubts remain about the responsibility for some of those attacks.
Zakayev, who represents a more moderate wing of the Chechen resistance, has spent more than two decades since the end of the first phase of the Second Chechen War in exile, mostly in the United Kingdom. He has worked to avoid having his portrait added to the wall of martyrs.
In 2007, police at Scotland Yard warned Zakayev that he was high up on a Russian hit list. But he survived. And in 2022, as Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Zakayev decamped to Ukraine—“unquestionably the leader of the entire free world,” he said.
He sees plenty of parallels between their struggles. “Ukrainians have felt what it was like for us, back in 1994,” Zakayev said. “We were branded as terrorists, as Islamic extremists.”
Zakayev said that this view of the Chechens, fostered by Putin but accepted by the West, is a “great pity.” It has brought about a global view of the Chechen people as either Putin’s shock troops or as violent terrorists. These are views that Putin has relished, broadcasting images of Chechen fighters in an attempt to carry out psychological warfare in Ukraine and using Chechen contract killers to kill Russian liberals such as Boris Nemtsov. Since the start of Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, Chechen fighters have been dispatched to fight across Ukraine.
“We are destroying this image by siding with Ukraine and by being here,” Zakayev said.
The Chechens’ support for Ukraine isn’t just symbolic. Chechen volunteers have also fought with the Ukrainians in the Donbas since 2014. Since the full-scale invasion in 2022, they have joined the Russian Legion and other militias of Russian citizens who are fighting alongside Ukraine. When he spoke to Foreign Policy in March, Zakayev’s soldiers were taking part in cross-border incursions into the Belgorod region, a precursor to Ukraine’s larger offensive in Kursk today.
“It’s a very important strategic step, of transferring the combat actions to the enemy’s territory, because it’s the first time in years that the Russians have finally felt what the war is,” Zakayev said. “Since World War II, Russia has waged a lot of wars, but they’ve never felt what a war is like on their own territory. Finally, they’re beginning to experience aid raid alarms, they’re beginning to experience explosions, and they’re starting to feel this war on their own territory.”
To that end, Zakayev no longer sees independence as a regional and isolated concern. In his eyes, independence for Chechnya—and Ukraine, Siberia, Dagestan, and other Russian subjects—can only be achieved through toppling the Russian state itself.
“Putin’s war, that he started in Ukraine, must end in Moscow,” Zakayev continued. “And the people who are going to end this war must be Russians.”
Earlier this year, a correspondent with Russian state broadcaster Channel One toured the trenches on the front lines, reviewing “trophies” taken from Ukrainian fighters killed in action. In the video, the correspondent holds up two patches removed from the fighters’ uniforms—one of which, he says, is the Canadian flag. He looks to the camera: “The presence of mercenaries in the ranks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is no secret.”
The video prompted dozens of laughing face emojis when it was posted on Telegram by an account run by Free Ingria, a separatist movement in Russia’s Leningrad Oblast. The patch was not the Canadian red maple leaf at all, but the flag of Udmurtia, a republic in the Urals.
The Ingria separatists, who want independence for the historical Baltic region around the former imperial capital of St. Petersburg, and the Udmurtia separatists, who want an independent state in their region west of the Ural mountains, may be more than 800 miles apart, but they have recently made common cause.
It’s all thanks to Oleg Magaletsky.
Shortly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, Magaletsky founded the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum. Composed of two dozen regionalist movements from across the Russian Federation, including the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, it has become the coordinating body for those hoping to dismantle Russia itself.
It is not the only game in town: The Lithuania-based Free Russia Forum, founded by Russian chess grandmaster and dissident Garry Kasparov, has aimed to become a think tank and philosophical hub for this post-imperial Russia.
Magaletsky’s group is much more hands-on.
“We need to be prepared for big changes—for the collapse,” Magaletsky told me, sitting in a pie shop in Kyiv.
Magaletsky is an unlikely champion for the cause of Russian secession—he’s a soft-spoken and personable Ukrainian restaurateur who was turned on to politics by the Euromaidan protests. Yet he has thrown himself into the work, and he’s moved quickly.
His forum has served as a hub to coordinate the exiled leaders of these independence movements, who, in turn, coordinate with their compatriots who are still in Russia. They’ve also held a series of summits to connect some of the leaders of Russia’s “captive nations” with academics, strategists, and government officials around the world.
When the Free Russia Forum brought some of its members to Washington for a series of talks at the Jamestown Foundation in March, they stressed just how much of Russia’s might comes from its imperial conquests: its access to the Black Sea, its natural resources, and even the fighters who feed its army.
“[There] has been a litany of trials and losses of lives, lands, resources, culture, and language, taken away by the empire,” Radjana Dugar-DePonte, the co-chair of the Buryad-Mongol Erkheten Democratic Movement, told the attendees. The Buryat people are wildly overrepresented in the death toll from the Russia-Ukraine war, as are other ethnic minorities.
When he had the opportunity, Pavel Mezerin enlisted to fight alongside the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
While Zakayev’s forces joined the fight early, more and more Russian dissidents in exile were signing up to fight with Ukraine. Magaletsky rattles off the component members of his forum and which unit they fight under. He said that some are with the Siberian Battalion, others serve with the Free Russia Legion, and others are fighting directly under the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Mezerin, who hails from Ingria, joined the Siberian Battalion but soon grew disenchanted with the mission.
The Ukrainian leadership, he told Foreign Policy, “was not interested in forming full-fledged combat units from Russian citizens who would fight for the freedom of Russia.” They were more “political projects than actual military units,” he added. It was “a very sad experience” for Mezerin—he quit the battalion and channeled his energy through Free Ingria, of which he is a coordinator.
Mezerin told me that he perfectly understands that Ukraine’s priority is in recapturing its own territory. He has been watching afar as Ukraine has pulled off its extraordinary invasion of the Kursk region and is cheering on his former comrades. This time, however, the Ukrainians used their regular soldiers instead of Russian militias. “I sincerely envy the people of Kursk,” Mezerin said.
If it was his territory that had been “liberated” by Ukraine, he said, “of course, we would return there immediately. We would be busy organizing armed militias, armed detachments. Ingria would be free.” He dreams of Ukrainian forces continuing their march north to St. Petersburg.
But he knows that this is a fantasy. “Ukraine is not interested in these regions,” he said, recognizing that they would almost certainly be traded for Ukrainian territory in any peace talks. “Ukraine is interested in its own freedom.”
The quest for independence falls on the shoulders of activists such as Mezerin and Zakayev. And independence, Magaletsky said, cannot come from a think tank. That’s why the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum is actively involved in helping dissidents inside Russia prepare for what comes next.
“We have public activities,” Magaletsky said cryptically. “And, of course, we have unpublic activities.”
While he was careful not to put too much stock in a single operation, Magaletsky said that anything that could dismantle the idea of a “single and indivisible” Russian state would ultimately help their cause. “It is not so much the actual operation of the Ukrainian army in the Kursk region, as the reaction of both the Kremlin and the ‘Russian people’ to it in general.”
To that end, his operation requires a diversity of tactics. “Not all movements have people who are fighting now on the front line,” Magaletsky added, before offering me some of his pie. Others, he said, have members who are still inside Russia, making plans and preparations for when things change.
“They’re preparing, not for a big war on the front line—they’re preparing for their cities fighting.”
Everyone involved said that the work is hard—and dangerous. The Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum was declared an “undesirable organization” by Moscow in 2023 and attacked as an alleged CIA front group by news outlets loyal to the Kremlin. Many of the forum’s members have faced FSB crackdowns for years, and their projects have been declared extremist organizations.
However, Magaletsky said that their work is critical. Although the West has long supported the idea of a democratic Russia, its leaders seem sure that a change at the top is all that is needed. Magaletsky disagrees: “Putin is the result,” he said. “The problem is the imperial, colonial, system of Russia.”
Kyiv is certainly sympathetic to that view. The Ukrainian Rada has recognized Chechnya as “temporarily occupied” by Russia, and it is contemplating full recognition for the independence movements for Tatarstan, Chechnya, and Bashkortostan.
The West, however, is far from any such recognition.
“We, here in Ukraine, remember, of course, the speech of [then-U.S. President] George [H.W.] Bush, the so-called ‘Chicken Kiev’ speech,” he said, referring to the president’s 1991 address to the legislature of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, in which he warned against “suicidal nationalism” and declared that “freedom is not the same as independence.”
“Now, post-Russia chicken speeches are popular,” Magaletsky wrote to me recently. “We are trying to change that.” He will keep trying to win over converts in Western capitals. The forum held its next round of meetings in Vilnius, Lithuania, in June.
As Mezerin told me, there’s no room for fatalism. “I’m an opposition politician in exile, so I’m an optimist. Otherwise, I would have no reason to go on living.”
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