Free Russian Forum Now Focuses on Helping Ukraine rather than on Transforming Russia, Shtepa Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 18 – All people of good will can only welcome the commitment of the Free Russia Forum to support Ukraine against Russian aggression, Vadim Shtepa says; but such people can only bemoan the fact that that Forum is almost completely ignoring the need to transform Russia.

            The editor of the Tallinn-based regionalist portal Region.Expert argues that this is doubly unfortunate. On the one hand, unless Russia is transformed, the Muscovite state will remain a threat to Ukraine even if Kyiv succeeds in achieving its proclaimed goal of restoring its control up to its 1991 borders.

            And on the other, such an approach ignores the problems the residents of the country Moscow rules that any group offers itself as being about a Free Russia should be trying to come up with (ru.themoscowtimes.com/2026/02/18/forum-svobodnoi-ukraini-ili-kak-iz-rossiiskogo-meropriyatiya-ischezla-rossiiskaya-povestka-a187616 reposted at region.expert/fsu/).

            This week, the Forum of Free Russia met in Vilnius for two days. The first day was closed, but the second was open; and the meeting released a statement about what it had hoped ot achieve. What the accessible information suggests, Shtepa says, is that the Forum’s participants see a Ukrainian victory even as defined by Ukraine as a magic solution to Russia’s problems.

            But unless the restoration of Ukrainian control over all that country’s land up to the 199a borders leads to the transformation of Russia, the Muscovite state will still present challenges not only to Ukraine but also to other neighbors of that country and perhaps especially to the peoples living within the borders of the Russian Federation.

            According to the regionalist, “the problem of the Forum of Free Russia from its very first meetings ten years ago is that its organizers from the outset considered the regional issue as something secondary” and its activities showed that “Muscovite politicians even in emigration remained Moscow-centric” rather than considering what a truly Free Russia should look like.

            In the current situation, emigres can have only a limited impact on what goes on inside their country; but the Free Russia Forum should follow the example of earlier Russian emigrations and at a minimum focus on the problems of the entire country and offer ideas for discussion, steps it is not now taking, Shtepa argues.

            Indeed, even the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has recognized this need, given that it has included at least a limited number of representatives of the regions and republics of the current Russian Federation in its platform for discussions with the democratic Russian opposition.

            It is time, Shtepa says, that the Free Russian Forum do at least as much. Otherwise, it won’t help Ukraine as much as it hopes; and it won’t help Russia very much at all. That is because unless the state now called the Russian Federation changes, it will remain a threat to Ukraine even if Kyiv "wins" and a threat to its own people and others regardless of the outcome of Putin's war.