‘Partisans should work with whoever they want’ Wealthy Russians have a history of funding the anti-Putin opposition. Here’s how they do it — and what’s in it for them.

For several months, a fierce debate has raged in Russian opposition circles over the funding of political organizations, encompassing everything from the ideal level of transparency for anti-Kremlin groups to verboten sources of money. In collaboration with RFE/RL’s Russian-language investigative unit Systema, Meduza pulls back the curtain on cases of cooperation between high-profile figures in Russia’s business world and the political opposition, untangling how some wealthy Russians support the anti-Putin resistance — and what they hope to get in return.

The following is an abridged translation of a joint investigation Meduza originally published in Russian on March 26, 2025.

The Prague club

In February, a team called the Global Russians took first place in the blitz tournament at the International Chess Federation’s World Senior Team Championship. Despite its name, the team had members from different countries, including Ukraine; it had been assembled by chess grandmaster Igor Glek and politician Denis Bilunov to unite players who oppose the invasion of Ukraine and support democracy. 

“Representation of Russian citizens in this sport is no longer solely associated with the Putinist state,” says Bilunov. “The prank was a success!”

The son of the head coach of the USSR’s national women’s chess team, Bilunov began working with grandmaster and Kremlin critic Garry Kasparov in the 1990s, first on media projects and then on political initiatives. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Bilunov co-founded the Prague Russian Anti-War Committee. The scheme to enter the Global Russians into the World Senior Team Chess Championship was his idea, but it was businessman Yuri Tatarsky who covered the team’s expenses. 

“Believe me, everyone in Russia who needs to will find out about this. I think we’ll also be hit with criminal cases for daring to smuggle an opposition team into the official FIDE championship,” Tatarsky says. Though far removed from chess, he considers the “prank” an important political gesture. The International Chess Federation’s president, former Russian deputy prime minister Arkady Dvorkovich, “will be furious,” he adds. 

* * *

Yuri Tatarsky wasn’t particularly well-known until recently. A relatively influential businessman in Omsk in the early 2000s, he co-owned a fleet of Pyaterochka convenience stores with an estimated monthly turnover north of a million dollars. Over time, he got into wholesale trade and the restaurant business, too. But his success story ended in 2005 when his business partner sued him, prompting the authorities to launch a criminal case. 

Tatarsky was arrested in 2007 and sentenced in 2008 to six years in prison for embezzlement. He describes the case as a “classic hostile takeover” aimed at seizing his companies and his wealth. 

Initially, Tatarsky was held in a prison hospital and a pre-trial detention facility. “If there’s such a thing as carceral hell, it’s Omsk,” he says. “Everyone [in the security services] knows I was tortured. They hung me on a rack and broke my arms. Being subjected to electric shocks for a week straight was the norm. They [must have] thought I was a light bulb.” 

Tatarsky claims that in the prison hospital, he was deliberately placed in a tuberculosis ward and had a doctor threaten to inject him with a syringe contaminated with HIV. “I kept the window open all the time, and it was freezing in my room, 24/7. I didn’t eat the prison food — my parents brought me packages — and I lost 70 kilograms [154 pounds],” Tatarsky recalls. “From time to time, after the police demanded I testify against myself [and I refused], I ended up in solitary. After a week or two, I started talking to the mice.”

The businessman’s lawyers filed a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights. Tatarsky claims the court accepted the application for consideration, but then “the complaint was lost.” In response to questions for this story, however, the European Court said it had rejected Tatarsky’s application as inadmissible. 

Tatarsky remained in prison until 2010, when he was released on parole. He left Russia a few years later and moved to Prague in early 2014, bringing his “savings” with him. He says he now works as a consultant for companies in the restaurant industry.

* * *

When Russia launched its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Tatarsky had the means to help those in need. According to the businessman, he supported the Prague-based Dobra House Foundation and School of Cultural Youth, distributed humanitarian aid to Ukrainian refugees, and, in his free time, spoke at protest rallies. 

“What struck me most [at the time] was the human factor, the people and the children. There was just a terribly huge influx of refugees. They needed absolutely everything, from toothbrushes to toilet paper, everything. There was simply a lot of work [to be done],” he recalls. 

By mid-2022, Tatarsky had become a well-known figure in Prague. So, when Denis Bilunov came up with the idea of opening an anti-war hub for Russian-speaking émigrés in the city, Tatarsky sprang to mind. (Bilunov had actually met him back in 2021, at a rally in support of Alexey Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in prison in Russia last February.) 

According to Bilunov’s estimate, Tatarsky initially invested roughly 10,000 euros to cover start-up costs, leading to the opening of Novoe Mesto — a cross between a bookstore and a political club. After its original location flooded, Novoe Mesto relocated to a room attached to the 2Baldies Restaurant, an unassuming Italian eatery on the outskirts of Prague. “Those are my partners, let’s put it that way,” Tatarsky says with a wink. 

Lined with shelves of Russian-language books and decorated with back issues of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Novoe Mesto’s total expenses — including salaries, relocation costs, and catering for the occasional event — have amounted to around 30,000 euros over six months, Bilunov estimates. The club doesn’t make any money, he laments, adding that “Yuri really likes to pay for everyone’s food.” 

According to Tatarsky, he also helps bring in various speakers, including opposition figures, and promotes these events in the Russian-speaking community. Asked why he spends time and money on Novoe Mesto, he replies, “Let’s just say I don’t know any better.”

“And it doesn’t help with my [legal] documents at all,” he adds. 

Nearly everyone who’s heard of Tatarsky knows he’s had problems obtaining residency. He talks about it quite openly, saying he’s currently living in Czechia “without any rights” and can’t even open a bank account, let alone register a business. Citing a non-disclosure agreement, he declines to provide details about his current residency application, which has been in progress since 2020. 

Several sources suggested that the businessman’s community involvement is really aimed at pleasing the Czech authorities. But Tatarsky maintains that his motivations are not cynical. At the same time, he says he still fears persecution by the Russian authorities, especially in light of anti-war activities in Prague. 

According to Bilunov, Tatarsky never asked him to intercede or appeal to the Czech authorities on his behalf, though he wouldn’t have said no. 

“Many people who know Yuri call him a ‘shady guy’ behind his back, even though they still take money from him. This seems pretty hypocritical: if you take money from someone, then be prepared to acknowledge it and express gratitude publicly. Or, if you think he’s a ‘shady guy,’ refuse his help,” says Ekaterina Katz, the director of the Dobra House Foundation, which receives support from Tatarsky and provides humanitarian aid to Ukrainian refugees and residents.

Today, Yuri Tatarsky is one of many Russian businessmen who unexpectedly find themselves closely tied to the exiled political opposition.

Old ties

In mid-March 2022, Zhanna Nemtsova got a phone call from Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman. He and his business partner in the Alfa Group conglomerate, Petr Aven, had been sanctioned as oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. And though Nemtsova hadn’t spoken to Fridman in several years, he wanted to ask a favor: Would she be willing to record a video saying Alfa Group isn’t a sponsor of the war against Ukraine or a beneficiary of Putin’s regime? 

Fridman called Nemtsova for a reason. He was an old friend of her late father, Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. After Nemtsov was gunned down near the Kremlin in 2015, Fridman transferred two million dollars to his partner, Irina Koroleva, to help the late politician’s family. (Koroleva declined to answer questions for this story, saying, “I won’t comment. And don’t write to me anymore.”) 

According to Nemtsova, Fridman had also donated $200,000 to her non-profit, the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom, back in 2018. “The foundation was in a critical situation; there was nothing to pay salaries with,” she recalls. “I had various options for how to plug this hole [but] nothing worked, and I decided to turn to Fridman. I met with him in Europe; he said supporting the Nemtsov Foundation was super dangerous [for him] but he was willing to give $200,000 in cash.”

Fridman transferred the money through an intermediary in Russia and asked that the donation “never be made public,” Nemtsova says, fearing any hint of cooperation with the opposition could harm him. According to a source close to Fridman, he didn’t think of it as “sponsoring the opposition” — the donation was nothing more than a personal gesture of support for his late friend’s daughter.

Nevertheless, in 2022, Nemtsova refused to vouch for Fridman. “It seems to me that when Ukraine is being bombed, it would be morally wrong for me, as a person and a public figure, to record such a video. It’s my firm belief that no major Russian financial-industrial group can operate independently of the state — it’s just not how things work,” she explains. 

Read more about Fridman’s frozen wealth

Billing Russia’s billionaires How Ukraine is going after Mikhail Fridman and Roman Abramovich’s sanctioned wealth 

2 years ago

Read more about Fridman’s frozen wealth

Billing Russia’s billionaires How Ukraine is going after Mikhail Fridman and Roman Abramovich’s sanctioned wealth 

2 years ago

Fridman reached out to Nemtsova again in 2023, asking her to write a letter confirming his donation to the Nemtsov Foundation “in the amount of $200,000.” 

“I spoke to his lawyers on the phone and wrote a letter, in which I said that all of this was kept in strictest confidence [at Fridman’s request],” Nemtsova recalls. According to her, Fridman’s legal team planned to present the letter in court when challenging European sanctions. But as she told Fridman in 2022, Nemtsova didn’t think her endorsement would help Alfa Group: “I said, ‘Mr. Fridman, the key thing is public condemnation of the war.’ I know his position, that it’s suicide to condemn the war under Putinism. But for me, it’s suicide to participate in his war to lift sanctions.” 

Nemtsova has never spoken publicly about receiving help from Fridman before. The authors of this story first learned about it from other sources. When asked about the donation, Nemtsova maintains that she tried to return the money. “I wanted the pressure that was being put on me to stop. I didn’t want Fridman to drag me and the Nemtsov Foundation into his sanctions war,” she says.

Fridman wouldn’t let Nemtsova return the $200,000, telling her to “dispose of it as you see fit.” Ultimately, she decided to “direct these funds” toward humanitarian aid for Ukraine. Fridman refused to comment on the matter.

* * *

Zhanna Nemtsova isn’t the only longtime acquaintance who disappointed Fridman. When seeking endorsements, the oligarch also contacted veteran journalist Yevgenia Albats, the editor-in-chief of the Russian opposition magazine The New Times. The two were both members of the Russian Jewish Congress and on friendly terms, but this may not be the only reason Fridman called. According to a source close to Brandeis University, more than 20 years ago, he provided a $50,000 grant for Albats’s daughter to study at this private college in Massachusetts. 

Albats denies receiving any financial support from Fridman, and she ignored follow-up questions about the alleged grant. She also refused to sign a letter vouching for the oligarch. When his British lawyers called and asked her whether Fridman and Aven “deserved the sanctions,” the journalist replied, “Yes, they do.” 

Fridman’s business partner was similarly rebuffed when he sought help from prominent Russian economist Sergei Guriev, two of Guriev’s acquaintances claim. According to these sources, Aven had provided several years’ worth of financial support to the New Economic School — a private university in Moscow that Guriev headed from 2004 to 2013. However, when Aven asked for help in ridding himself of sanctions, the economist suggested that he issue a statement condemning the war. (Replying to questions for this story, Guriev said, “No comment.” Aven similarly declined to speak to journalists.)

Exiled former oil tycoon and Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky also advised the Alfa Group co-owners to issue an anti-war statement. As he recalls, 

Neither Fridman nor Aven made any anti-war statements. Back in 2022, Fridman explained his stance in a letter to the staff of his London-based investment company, LetterOne. “I do not make political statements,” he said. “I am convinced, however, that war can never be the answer. This crisis will cost lives and damage two nations that have been brothers for hundreds of years.” He then went on to complain in the press about being subject to sanctions. In turn, Aven vented his frustrations to the Financial Times, saying, “Our business is completely destroyed. Everything which we were building for 30 years is now completely ruined.” 

Nevertheless, the two did manage to secure letters of support from a number of prominent opposition figures, including veteran journalist Sergey Parkhomenko, Nobel laureate Dmitry Muratov, and Leonid Volkov, who resigned as chairman of the Navalny-founded Anti-Corruption Foundation after his endorsement of Fridman provoked a scandal. 

Opposition politician Ilya Yashin, jailed in Russia at the time for condemning the army’s atrocities in Ukraine, wrote a handwritten letter of support for Fridman but refused to vouch for Aven. “Fridman asked me to put pen to paper, so I did. He was my late friend [Boris Nemtsov’s] comrade. I know that he helped Borya, and this means something to me,” Yashin explains. “I don’t consider Fridman a warmonger, to be honest. He also asked me to [write a letter] for Aven, but I refused because I don’t know him.” (Yashin was freed in a historic prisoner swap in August 2024 and now lives in exile.)

In the end, however, these endorsements proved to be of little use. By 2023, Fridman and Aven had only managed to change the wording of European sanctions, which reclassified their holdings from “sponsors of war” to “fundamental enterprises of the Russian economy.” The letters of support from Russian opposition figures were not used in the court proceedings. Having achieved nothing, Fridman returned to Russia. However, he and Aven (who lives in Latvia) have not abandoned their efforts to get out from under the sanctions. 

According to a Russian businessman currently under both E.U. and U.S. sanctions, “European lawyers explicitly say these words and letters [of support from opposition figures] don’t mean anything. These are political decisions made for other reasons.” 

Nevertheless, these aren’t the only examples of entanglements between Russian business magnates and the political opposition. 

The collapse of Trust 

Russian banker Ilya Yurov remembers meeting Alexey Navalny at a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert in Moscow in 2012. 

At the time, Navalny was a leading figure in the protest movement that had emerged in opposition to voter fraud in Russia’s 2011 State Duma elections, which Yurov had followed closely. For the banker, who “had long been interested in politics,” the mass protests “stirred up everything.” He even joined an “informal expert council on economics” created by none other than Arkady Dvorkovich — then a presidential aide to Dmitry Medvedev — under the auspices of a chess club. (Dvorkovich did not reply to questions sent to his assistant.) 

Yurov claims he kept in touch with Navalny until the opposition leader’s poisoning in 2020, advising him on economic issues and making “irregular donations” to his non-profit, the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF). According to the banker, the donations amounted to “mere pennies,” given the scale of the group’s operations. Navalny’s former chief of staff, Leonid Volkov, did not reply to questions about Yurov. 

* * *

Ilya Yurov began his banking career in the 1990s, working for another Kremlin critic: Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Then the CEO of the Russian oil giant Yukos, Khodorkovsky was also the founder and board chairman of Menatep Bank. By the time the oil tycoon was arrested in 2003, he was considered Russia’s richest man, and Yurov was one of Menatep Bank’s top managers. In fact, Yurov was part of the management team that acquired the bank in 2004 and rebranded it as National Bank Trust.

According to Yurov, it was because of his connection to Khodorkovsky that he first faced political persecution. In March 2008, a SWAT team raided his country house in connection with the Yukos case. As Yurov previously told Meduza, he narrowly escaped imprisonment thanks to the “intercession of Patriarch Alexey” — the then-head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who happened to be an old family friend. The Patriarch telephoned Putin on Yurov’s behalf. As a result, he was released on bail in exchange for testifying as a witness for the prosecution in the second Yukos case. 

Yurov says that due to the “interference of top officials,” news of his arrest didn’t “leak” publicly, preventing any damage to National Bank Trust. Indeed, when Yurov met Navalny in 2012, the bank was on the rise: it had hired American actor Bruce Willis to star in a high-profile ad campaign and was ranked among Russia’s top banks.

But in 2014, National Bank Trust collapsed. As it turned out, the bank’s management had been filing fraudulent reports to Russia’s Central Bank since 2008, as part of an alleged scheme to cover up bad debts and enrich key executives. The resulting balance sheet hole totaled 114 billion rubles (roughly $3 billion at the time), forcing the Central Bank to intervene to protect National Bank Trust from bankruptcy. 

The regulator shelled out hundreds of billions of rubles for a bailout and appointed the privately owned Otkritie FC Bank to oversee National Bank Trust’s rescue. A few months later, the Russian authorities charged Yurov and his partners with embezzlement and fraud, accusing them of syphoning out 14.6 billion rubles (about $380 million in 2014) through Cypriot companies. 

But by that point, Yurov was already in Ukraine, working as an advisor to former President Viktor Yushchenko. He later moved to the U.K., where National Bank Trust filed a lawsuit against its former owners in 2016. Russia tried to extradite Yurov two years later, but a U.K. court refused the request on the grounds that he wouldn’t get a fair trial. According to Yurov, this ruling ultimately allowed him to obtain political asylum. 

During his extradition hearing, Yurov’s defense lawyers argued that the charges against him were “politically motivated,” because Russian investigators considered him part of an “organized group” linked to Khodorkovsky. This line of argumentation was widely reported in the Russian press, with the business daily Kommersant calling Khodorkovsky, who had fled to London following his release from prison in 2013, the “X factor” in Yurov’s case. Be that as it may, Khodorkovsky says he didn’t testify on Yurov’s behalf for his asylum claim because “nobody asked.”

Today, Yurov’s story echoes that of another prominent Russian banker who was recently at the center of an opposition scandal: Sergey Leontiev of Probusinessbank. 

‘People with dubious reputations’

Last October, Russian YouTuber and political activist Maxim Katz released an investigation accusing the former owners of Probusinessbank, Sergey Leontiev and Alexander Zheleznyak, of stealing money from investors and then “laundering” their reputations by providing large donations and administrative help to Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. 

The ACF denied the allegations. Nonetheless, Zheleznyak resigned as the treasurer of its U.S. branch after Katz’s investigation came out.

In a recent interview with popular YouTuber Yuri Dud, former ACF chairman Leonid Volkov said Leontiev began donating to the non-profit after Navalny’s 2020 poisoning and “never asked for anything in return.” Those inside the organization “really didn’t see” how the bankers used their connections to the ACF to “build their reputations” abroad, he added. 

According to a 2022 Financial Times article, however, the New York judge who approved Leontiev’s asylum application wrote in her ruling that if the U.S. were to reject it, he would “undoubtedly be jailed and tortured and deprived [of] medical treatment” in Russia because of his ties to Navalny. And in a 2018 declaration cited by The Bell, Leontiev told another New York court that his associations with “the U.S. embassy and Navalny” had made both him and his businesses “targets of political persecution” in Russia. 

Leontiev’s connections to Navalny date back to 2012, when the anti-corruption activist was invited to speak at a strategy session for managers and employees of Zheleznyak and Leontiev’s banking network. Shortly thereafter, one of their affiliates, Bank24, agreed to partner with Navalny on a credit card designed to help finance the Anti-Corruption Foundation, offering a one-percent cashback reward for every purchase made. 

However, after news of the “Navalny Card” leaked in the press, Bank24 “began receiving threatening calls from the Central Bank,” Leontiev said in the 2018 declaration. “The Russian government’s swift and hostile reaction was intimidating, causing us to succumb to their pressure to distance ourselves from, and ultimately abandon, the Navalny Card,” he claimed.

According to The Bell, Leontiev also wrote in his U.S. asylum application that these dealings with Navalny “provoked the wrath” of the Russian authorities, who subsequently summoned him and his business partner for questioning and raided Probusinessbank’s offices under the pretext of “fabricated problems” with the bank’s liquidity. (He also argued that he wouldn’t be able to fight the criminal charges against him “because in Russia, lawyers are often sent to prison,” reported The Bell.)

As FT reported, the judge reviewing Leontiev’s U.S. asylum application compared his case to that of Sergei Magnitsksy, a Russian tax adviser who was arrested after uncovering an embezzlement scheme by tax officials and died in a notorious Moscow remand prison in 2009. The fact that several Russian officials who were sanctioned for their involvement in the Magnitsky case were also involved in the proceedings against Probusinessbank only helped Leontiev’s asylum claim.

One of the authors of the U.S. Magnitsky Act, former Yukos adviser Pavel Ivlev, also testified on Leontiev’s behalf. “When preparing ourselves to defend such cases, we really do study everyone in the case materials for connections to the [Magnitsky] sanctions list, to show the monstrous state of the Russian law enforcement system,” he explains. 

Ivlev himself left Russia for the United States in 2004, after the authorities brought charges against him in connection with the Yukos case. He now runs a law firm that provides counsel to business people and political activists “both in Russia and abroad.” (Over the years, the firm’s client list has included the likes of Khodorkovsky, the late oligarch Boris Berezovsky, and billionaire Leonid Nevzlin.) 

A devoted Navalny supporter who assisted his anti-corruption investigations, Ivlev considered the late opposition leader an old friend. “You can only say that about someone who has been a guest in your home. Well, Navalny had been to mine,” he says proudly. 

Unlike Maxim Katz, who referred to Zheleznyak and Leontiev as “banksters” in his investigation, Ivelev doesn’t think that Navalny’s team should have avoided associating with the former Probusinessbank owners. In his words, 

READ MORE ABOUT THE SCANDAL

The banking scandal that broke Russia’s anti-Kremlin opposition

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A point of vulnerability

Editor’s note: In 2014, Meduza’s founders approached two businessmen mentioned in this article, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Zimin, as potential investors. Khodorkovsky and Zimin put up $500,000 (you can read more about that here), but the talks reached a dead end before Meduza's launch. In the end, Meduza was launched with this money and loans from friends, which were later repaid. Up until 2021, Meduza was funded by advertising. In the years since, our newsroom has relied on crowdfunding. 

In his interview with Yuri Dud, Leonid Volkov explained that, ever since the Russian authorities outlawed Navalny’s movement as an “extremist organization” in 2021, information about the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s financials has not been made publicly available. “Everything that has to do with our financing and our money is such a serious point of vulnerability,” he said. “By publishing our [financial reports] in full, we’d show our opponents how to destroy us.”

“On the one hand, that’s true. On the other hand, the need to live underground forces one not to tell the truth, and sometimes, to tell lies. And at the end of the day, it changes one’s ethics,” says Russian businessman and philanthropist Boris Zimin. 

Zimin openly sponsored the ACF for more than a decade. But after Navalny’s imprisonment in 2021, his trust in the organization “began to disappear,” he says. “I began to lose my understanding of what the ACF was doing, and after events like Alfagate, I lost trust in what ACF says and in the organization more broadly.” Zimin pulled his sponsorship of the organization in May 2024. (Just months after Navalny’s death.) 

* * *

The Anti-Corruption Foundation’s 2021 U.S. tax returns include a partial list of its sponsors and the amounts they donated. Former Yukos vice-president Konstantin Kagalovksy, for example, donated $100,000 that year. He says he decided to help the ACF in 2020, after he met Navalny in Germany, where the opposition leader was recovering from nerve-agent poisoning. 

Kagalovsky estimates his total contributions to the ACF at $500,000. “As far as I remember, I spent half a mil on them. If Navalny were alive, I’d have spent more. If it weren’t for Navalny, the ACF wouldn’t have received a cent from me,” he says. 

Khodorkovsky says that, during his time in prison, he provided financial aid to Navalny for “two or three years,” through his then-lawyer, Pavel Ivlev. (Ivlev refused to comment on “Khodorkovsky’s statement.”) He also claims he gave two grants to Navalny’s team “through Leonid Volkov” following his release. As Navalny told Meduza in 2016, the exiled tycoon also paid for his lawyers in the Yves Rocher case for two years. 

Per the ACF’s 2021 tax returns, it received a $7,000 donation from prominent economist Sergey Aleksashenko, the former deputy chairman of Russia’s Central Bank. Aleksashenko says he supported Navalny’s organization for several years, “out of respect for what Alexey did,” but he withdrew his sponsorship last year. “The foundation has turned into a media platform, [and] the focus of its news [coverage] has to do with infighting,” he says, calling the ACF itself “an opaque business with unclear strategies and goals.”

That same year, the ACF also received donations totaling $25,000 from Danil Khachaturov, a former billionaire who once headed the Russian insurance giant Rosgosstrakh.

In September 2020, Rosgosstrakh filed a lawsuit against Khachaturov in California, accusing him of inflicting more than $205 million in damage to the company through “dubious contracts” with shell companies.” This came just months after a Moscow court sentenced his younger brother Sergey, a former top manager at Rosgosstrakh, to eight years in prison on charges of embezzlement and fraud. 

According to two acquaintances, Khachaturov currently lives in Los Angeles, where he runs an insurance services company called VR Corporation International. He did not reply to questions sent to the company’s email address. 

* * *

Asked about the ACF’s financial reports, Lenoid Volkov said the foundation “never revealed” the names of its donors or the amounts they donated. “Without their consent, disclosing any information about them not only seems like a bad idea, but it’s also simply illegal,” he maintained. “I’m surprised that, along with the FSB, both Meduza and Radio Svoboda have taken an interest in this information and have devoted their efforts to this urgent investigation.” (You can read Volkov’s full response, which he urged Meduza to publish, in Russian here.)

In response to follow-up questions, Volkov blocked one of the journalists who contributed to this story on Telegram. 

BORIS ZIMIN ON RELATIONSHIP WITH THE ACF

‘Where is its heart?’ Russian businessman and former donor Boris Zimin on his disillusionment with Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation

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BORIS ZIMIN ON RELATIONSHIP WITH THE ACF

‘Where is its heart?’ Russian businessman and former donor Boris Zimin on his disillusionment with Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation

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A tale of two bankers 

In early February 2012, before the start of a Cirque du Soleil performance at the State Kremlin Palace in Moscow, Vadim Belyaev took to the stage to say a few words. But instead of giving a traditional welcome speech, the chief executive of the Otkritie Holding (the private financial group sponsoring the show), unexpectedly urged the audience to join an upcoming protest march calling for fair elections. 

Belayev recalls his appeal at the Cirque du Soleil show as the moment the Russian authorities decided to put a “black mark” on him, though his fall didn’t come until 2017. That year, Russia’s Central Bank announced it was seizing control of the holding’s main asset, Otkritie FC Bank. The regulator claimed to have found a hole in the bank’s balance sheet totaling almost 190 billion rubles (about $3.3 billion at the time). Following a bailout, the Central Bank sold Otkritie to VTB, a majority state-owned bank headed by Andrey Kostin, an oligarch close to Putin. 

In the aftermath of the takeover, Belayev left Russia and, as he recalls, started donating to Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. “When your business is taken away from you, you’re resentful of the authorities who treated you this way,” he says, explaining his reasoning for supporting Navalny’s team:

According to the former banker, he donated “no more than $10,000” per month to the ACF’s U.S. branch for several years. “I can’t say that I shared Navalny’s ideology, but I thought of him as a heroic figure. I respected his position and believed it should be heard,” he says.

“The main reason why Vadim gave this money [to the ACF] was that the authorities in Russia are bad,” a close friend of the banker explains. “Plus, he never asked for anything in return.”

Leonid Volkov did not reply to Meduza’s questions about Belyaev’s donations. And his name does not appear in the ACF’s publicly available tax returns. Belayev says he thinks “such things should be as anonymous as possible.”

* * *

After emigrating to the United States, Belayev took his father’s surname: Wolfson. In 2020, Otkritie Bank and National Bank Trust, which it had ultimately failed to rescue, filed a claim against him in New York, accusing the former chief executive of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars through shell companies. He, in turn, rejected the lawsuit as “persecution.” 

Two years later, following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Belayev invested approximately $500,000 in the relaunch of Russia’s last independent television network, TV Rain, which had halted broadcasting due to the Kremlin’s wartime censorship laws. 

“Vadim was the first to call me and say: ‘You need to relaunch.’ I asked, ‘Can you help?’ and he replied, ‘Yes,’” recalls TV Rain founder Natalya Sindeeva. “If it weren’t for the tranche of money Vadim gave us in 2022, at the very start of the war, we wouldn’t have been able to relocate employees to Latvia and relaunch.” 

The former banker says he knows Sindeeva well and that he decided to support TV Rain because it was “broadcasting a point of view to Russian audiences — both those who left and those who stayed — that differed from the official one.” 

Russia placed Belayev on its international wanted list last August, after a Moscow court ordered his arrest in absentia on charges of major fraud. He says he isn’t to blame for Otkritie Bank’s collapse:

According to former deputy chairman Sergey Aleksashenko, however, the Central Bank did everything in its power to rescue Otkritie. “No defrauded depositors came to light not because they did not exist but because the Central Bank gave immeasurable amounts of money so the bank could continue operating and [Otkritie Bank’s new CEO Mikhail Zadoronov] paid them off,” he says. 

Aleksashenko believes the Central Bank subsequently suffered "colossal losses” on the sale of Otkritie, while state-owned VTB made a “decent profit.”

* * *

Belayev (or rather Wolfson, as he is known in the United States) faces legal trouble not only in Russia — he is also under indictment in the U.S. for allegedly helping none other than VTB’s head, Andrey Kostin, evade sanctions. 

According to the Justice Department, Belyaev helped the oligarch retain ownership of a luxury mansion in Aspen, Colorado, after the U.S. imposed sanctions on Kostin in 2018. Prosecutors say he did so by purchasing the LLC that formally owned the $12-million property — a company Kostin allegedly controlled through a series of offshore firms.

Charged with violating and conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (each offense carries a 20-year maximum prison sentence), Balyaev was arrested in February 2024 and then released on his own recognizance. In a New York court, he testified that he hadn’t broken the law, claiming to have actually purchased the property from Kostin on credit back in 2014 — four years before the oligarch was added to the U.S. sanctions list. Belyaev said Kostin occasionally visited the mansion afterward but only as a guest. The $12 million spent in 2019, he insisted, was used to repay the loan for the property purchase, not to benefit Kostin personally. 

Belayev refuses to comment on the case but maintains that he no longer speaks to Kostin. “We [Otkritie Bank and VTB] had joint projects. I treated [Kostin] with respect, as a public official. But after the war, the dividing line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ became completely different,” he explains. 

Belayev says he has no intention of using his support for the Russian opposition as part of his defense. He’s also leveled charges against U.S. officials in return, accusing FBI officers of exceeding their authority during his arrest. For now, the American justice system has been favorable to Belyaev, releasing him on bail and allowing him to remove his GPS monitor and travel between Texas, New York, and California for business. (He’s developing a startup called Foodture, which offers pizza vending machines.)

Belayev recently changed his Facebook profile picture, removing what used to be a selfie of him in a baseball cap printed with the words “Puck Futin.” According to the former banker, he still “occasionally” participates in fundraisers for Ukraine but stopped donating to the Anti-Corruption Foundation after Navalny’s death last year. “Because [after that] the foundation lost all meaning,” he says. 

‘Rivals in the anti-Putin field’

Since 2003, Yukos and Menatep co-founder Leonid Nevzlin has resided in Israel, where he is involved in philanthropy and publishing. Unlike many other businessmen who made their fortunes in Russia, he’s not under sanctions, and he has no need to prove his opposition bona fides in court. 

According to Zhanna Nemtsova, Nevzlin and Mikahil Khodorkovsky, his friend and former business partner, are making “the biggest private contributions to the anti-Putin resistance.” “From the point of view of the amounts, that’s true,” agrees opposition politician Vladimir Milov of the pro-democracy organization Free Russia Foundation. “[But] from the point of view of them being the main [contributors], it’s not.” 

“A great many people — you’d be surprised how many — lived and perhaps still live at Nevzlin’s expense,” says a friend of the businessman. According to this source, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, an important condition for receiving help from Nevzlin was silence. “The problem with saying ‘we’re living off Nevzlin’ is that Nevzlin is a real enemy of Putin. It’s simply dangerous,” the source explains. “Nevzlin wasn’t prepared to be responsible for the well-being of those he helps.” 

Even after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, few people spoke publicly about receiving help from Leonid Nevzlin. Instead, his name came up in a September 2024 Anti-Corruption Foundation investigation, which accused the businessman of hiring men to attack opposition figures, including Navalny allies Leonid Volkov and Ivan Zhdanov as well as Alexandra Petrachkova (the wife of exiled economist Maxim Mironov, who had criticized Nevzlin on social media). The ACF accused lawyer Anatoly Blinov of organizing the attacks, citing leaked messages apparently written by him and Nevzlin. Blinov was later arrested in Poland in connection with the incidents. (The ongoing Polish investigation also includes eight other suspects.) 

Nevzlin denied the accusations, dismissing the ACF’s investigation as a “leak concocted in Moscow.” Khodorkovsky, in turn, said he didn’t believe Nevzlin was involved in the attacks, which he condemned as “heinous crimes.” He also denied the AFC’s claim that he knew Nevzlin “took out a hit on Volkov.” 

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Then, last December, Nevzlin and Khodorkovsky were linked to another attack — this time on Free Russia Foundation president Natalia Arno. As Agentstvo Media reported, Arno was attacked in London shortly after a meeting with Khodorkovsky; the assailant stole her cell phone and shouted “Greetings from Nevzlin” (in Russian) before fleeing the scene. Arno confirmed the attack but declined to comment on it to Agentstvo, citing an ongoing police investigation. Khodorkovsky later posted an ironic tweet about the incident; Nevzlin didn’t comment at all. 

* * *

Both Nevzlin and Khodorkovsky have longstanding relationships with the Free Russia Foundation. “We have joint projects and communicate regularly,” Khodorkovsky says, without providing any further details. According to Khodorkovsky, he and opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who joined the Free Russia Foundation in 2018, have cooperated “in the field of protecting the rights and freedoms of citizens in Russia” for many years, “including on the Magnitsky Act and other similar projects.”

Kara-Murza and Nevzlin are old friends, and the businessman was also friends with the opposition politician’s father, historian and journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza Sr. Prior to Kara-Murza Sr.’s death from a prolonged illness in 2019, Nevzlin paid for his medical treatment, three sources close to the businessman and Kara-Murza claim. That same year, Kara-Murza Jr. released a documentary that listed Nevzlin as the film’s sponsor in the closing credits. 

According to producer Maria Lekukh, Nevzlin also sponsored a film about Kara-Murza himself, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2023 for opposing Russia’s war against Ukraine. “We were going to make a [film about Kara-Murza, but] it didn’t work out,” Lekukh said in an interview. “And Nevzlin spent a fairly large amount on it.” (Lekhukh declined to comment for this story, but another informed source confirmed that there were plans for such a project.) 

According to Khodorkovsky, he supported Kara-Murza’s family while the opposition politician was in prison; two sources from Kara-Murza’s circle say that Nevzlin also contributed. Moreover, four sources claim that Nevzlin donated money to Kara-Murza’s initiatives; two of them referred specifically to the Free Russia Foundation’s efforts to support political prisoners. (Kara-Murza’s wife Evgenia became the foundation’s international advocacy director while he was in prison. He was freed in August 2024, in the same landmark prisoner swap as Ilya Yashin.)

“Money in exchange for loyalty is a practice that originated in the 1990s. When wealthy people help various organizations, they expect loyalty in return,” says a source in the Russian opposition. 

But the source in Kara-Murza’s circle disagrees. “Nothing can influence Volodya except Volodya himself,” he says. “His decisions and financing have nothing to do with each other.” For example, the source explains, Nevzlin wasn’t able to dissuade Kara-Murza from returning to Russia in 2022.

Vladimir Kara-Murza and Natalia Arno did not respond to Meduza’s questions. 

* * *

Leonid Nevzlin has also helped another Russian opposition politician: Navalny ally Lyubov Sobol. She went public about this after the ACF accused Nevzlin of paying for attacks on opposition figures, saying she is supposed to repay a $56,000 interest-free loan from Nevzlin by the end of 2025. Sobol said Nevzlin helped to close the financial gap in 2022 when the YouTube channel she ran, Navalny Live, lost its ad revenue after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She also claimed that Nevzlin provided her with personal financial support after she fell ill in the summer of 2023. (Sobol suspects she was poisoned, but this remains unconfirmed.) 

Sobol says she has cut off contact with Nevzlin, although she has been raising funds to repay her debt. “I was very impressed by how Sobol behaved. Immediately after the investigation about Leonid Nevzlin came out, she wasn’t afraid. She came out openly and talked about her debt and began raising money,” says Zhanna Nemtsova, who contributed to Sobol’s fundraiser. 

Sobol claims that she tried to find other ways to save Navalny Live and her employees, but nothing came of it. “Businesses are obviously afraid to support opposition politicians and independent journalists — even those located abroad,” she says:

“There are no active, serious businessmen who are in contact with the opposition,” agrees Vladimir Milov. “There are individual businessmen who interact [with the opposition], but as a rule, this happens after they’ve lost their business[es]. Russian business always ignored the opposition and treated it with disdain.” 

Though Milov admits that raising money for the opposition is a “complicated story,” he doesn’t believe every funding offer is worth accepting. “For example, I don’t take [money] from Khodorkovsky and Nevzlin, so as not to put myself in a position where my political loyalty might be questioned,” he explains. “There’s a very limited circle of people who work with and show loyalty to them. Everyone else is wary of their money and support.” 

In Khodorkovsky’s case, Milov claims this attitude stems from a desire to “build a system of personal domination” within the Russian opposition: “He wants to be the leader. And of course, in this sense, his support is toxic.” Nevzlin, meanwhile, has a reputation for “attacks on opposition structures and supporting those who carry out these attacks,” Milov adds.

“I can say why I personally don’t take money from Nevzlin,” says Nemtsova. “Because I’ve always considered this person dangerous. Although after my father’s death in 2015, he offered me personal help.” 

Khodorkovsky categorically rejects the notion that he wants to be the “sole leader” of the Russian opposition. “To be one of the leaders or faces of the opposition among many others — [Yulia] Navalnaya, [Dmitry] Gudkov, [Vladimir] Kara-Murza, [Maxim] Katz, and so on — yes. To be the sole leader, no. I don’t want [that], I think it’s harmful,” he says. “My personal overall political goal has remained unchanged for many years. I want Russia to move away from authoritarianism and ‘leaderism’ when the window of opportunity arises.” 

Milov says that, unlike Khodorkovsky, Nevzlin’s motivation for supporting the Russian antiwar movement is less obvious. “Leonid Nevzlin constantly publicly emphasizes that he’s not interested in the Russian opposition,” he explains. “But he’s so uninterested in it that he’s actively immersed in it.” 

According to an acquaintance of Nevzlin, the businessman’s clashes with opposition figures are fueled by his determination to get his cut of the $50 billion in compensation Russia owes to former Yukos shareholders: “He sees everyone who criticizes Khodorkovsky or him personally as people who are going to prevent them from getting this money. He honestly sees political rivals in the anti-Putin field as dangerous.” 

Nevzlin has made no secret of the fact that he expects to receive this money, despite Russia’s refusal to pay compensation. In fact, according to two of the businessman’s acquaintances, Nevzlin thinks he’s entitled to a share of the $300 billion in Russian assets frozen abroad following Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. 

Khodorkovsky, who is neither involved in the international arbitration case over Yukos nor entitled to compensation (having given up his shares in the company following his arrest in 2003), says he’s “heard no such thing” from Nevzlin. Leonid Nevzlin declined to comment for this story. 

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‘Dissidents in exile’

Questions about funding used to be taboo in Russian opposition circles, but revelations over the past year about major sponsors have sparked a series of scandals, often arising from investigations within the opposition itself.

One recent example is an investigation by the Anti-Corruption Foundation that accused Maxim Katz’s wife, Ekaterina Patyulina, of collaborating with companies close to the Russian authorities. Allegedly, her clients include, among others, VKontakte (the social media site), Gazprom Media (a subsidiary of the state-owned energy giant), Positive Technologies (an IT security firm under Western sanctions since 2021), and National Media Group (a holding company affiliated with Putin’s longtime friend, billionaire Yuri Kovalchuk, with a board of directors chaired by Alina Kabayeva, who is believed to have multiple children with Vladimir Putin). 

The investigation claimed that Patyulina earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from these contracts and that Katz, who has been outspoken about his anti-war stance, lived off this money, too. Maxim Katz declined to comment for this story. 

Despite the finger-pointing, some sources in opposition circles say that being picky about financial support is unnecessary, especially in wartime. Five different people made comparisons to the Bolshevik revolutionaries allegedly taking money from Germany during World War I. 

“I’m far from judging events from a moral high ground. Despite all my dislike for Lenin, having taken money from the Germans, he acted in accordance with an understandable political logic and won,” says economist Dmitry Nekrasov. In his opinion, you shouldn’t take money from “some drug dealer,” but he sees no reason not to accept funding from Russian businessmen who made their money in an “obscure environment,” where “it was difficult to stay clean and there were many grey areas.”

A former top official in Russia’s Federal Tax Service, Nekrasov was simultaneously involved in business development. In 2012, he became the executive secretary of the Russian Opposition Coordination Council, a non-governmental body formed in the wake of mass protests against election fraud. He went on to provide financial support to opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov, with whom he created the Free Media Support Foundation. 

Nekrasov says there is no Russian opposition to speak of today — just “a certain set of dissidents in exile.” He himself has lived in exile in Cyprus for the past 10 years. 

Together with his longtime partner Gudkov, Nekrasov recently founded the Center for Analysis and Strategies in Europe (CASE), a think tank focused on former Soviet countries and the Russian-speaking diaspora in Europe and the United States. Gudkov and Nekrasov would not disclose the names of the think tank’s sponsors. 

“Here’s my stance: Russia is under occupation, Hitler is in power, [and] the partisans should work with whoever they want,” reasons a former Russian political consultant, speaking on condition of anonymity. The way he sees it, in the context of an authoritarian system that’s transforming into a totalitarian one, demanding transparency from the opposition becomes counterproductive.

The opposition’s backers seem to agree. “I’m very confused by the story with Zheleznyak and Leontiev, and the letter in support of Fridman, but we don’t decide the personal affairs of these people [the ACF’s leadership]. When we’re fighting a buffalo, there’s no other choice,” says one major donor, also speaking on condition of anonymity. 

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At the Free Russia Foundation, Vladimir Milov says opposition forces should vet their donors and diversify their funding sources to avoid suspicion. However, he acknowledges that the limited financial support available to opposition groups imposes difficult trade-offs where some will accept help even when it comes with strings attached.

“I stand by the principle of reputation. When it holds weight, opposition groups conduct due diligence on donors. But without it, that scrutiny disappears,” argues exiled businessman Evgeny Chichvarkin, who fled Russia in 2008. He says the Russian opposition has lost the reputational safeguards it once had.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Chichvarkin donated “several hundred thousand euros” to the Russian opposition. Most of the money went to help Navalny and the Anti-Corruption Foundation, while a smaller portion (approximately 5,000 to 10,000 euros) was allocated to opposition politician Ilya Yashin and his initiatives. “He helped fund the publication of reports after Nemtsov’s death and once paid for a lawyer at a misdemeanor trial. He gave about 5,000 [euros] two or three times,” Yashin confirms. 

For the past three years, Chichvarkin has redirected his focus to helping Ukraine, fundraising more than five million euros, according to his own calculations. The way he sees it, the Russian opposition used to do more to support Ukraine, but now its members are distracted by “squabbles” and scandals. “Everyone has really enjoyed fighting with each other because [fighting] Putin is hard,” he says, expressing an idea popular among the opposition.

Russian business has had a long, uneven relationship with the anti-Kremlin opposition, recalls a former political consultant, suggesting the late Boris Berezovsky as an example of one of the first Russian oligarchs who, “for the sake of reputational security,” not only purchased the business newspaper Kommersant but also financially supported the initiatives of human rights activist Yelena Bonner (the wife of Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov), as well as political parties, such as the People’s Patriotic Union of Russia and Liberal Russia. 

If Russian businessmen are willing to fund the anti-war opposition movement, there’s no shame in this for either party, Yashin says. In his view, the rich should help the opposition “because it’s the right thing to do,” not because the opposition owes them anything: “You don’t back the opposition expecting favors — you do it just so it doesn’t disappear.”