The Cost of Advocacy in a Hardening Russia

In a different geopolitical climate, Daria Egereva would be in New York this week, addressing the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. A Selkup advocate known for her work on the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change, Egereva has long served as a bridge between the environmental realities of the Russian North and the global stage. Instead, she sits in a Russian jail, facing up to 20 years in prison on charges of terrorism.

Egereva was arrested in December alongside Natalya Leongardt, another prominent advocate for Indigenous rights. The state's case rests on their historical involvement with the Aborigen Forum, an informal network of advocates that was forcibly disbanded by the government two years ago. By categorizing participation in such groups as "terrorism," the Kremlin has effectively criminalized the fundamental work of environmental and cultural preservation — and sent a signal that reverberates well beyond Russia's borders.

The Architecture of Repression

Russia's use of terrorism statutes against civil society actors follows a pattern that predates the current cases but has accelerated sharply since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The legal architecture is familiar: broad anti-extremism and anti-terrorism laws, originally framed as tools against armed separatism, are progressively reinterpreted to encompass nonviolent dissent. Organizations are first labeled "undesirable" or "foreign agents," then disbanded. Former members are subsequently prosecuted for having participated in groups that were, at the time of their involvement, entirely legal.

The Aborigen Forum fits this trajectory. For years, the network facilitated communication among Indigenous communities across Russia's vast northern territories — groups such as the Selkup, Nenets, and Khanty whose ancestral lands overlap with some of the world's most productive oil and gas fields. The forum's dissolution removed one of the few remaining channels through which these communities could coordinate responses to industrial encroachment and ecological degradation. The prosecution of Egereva and Leongardt now attaches criminal liability to that prior coordination, retroactively transforming civic participation into evidence of a security threat.

This approach carries a strategic logic. Indigenous land defenders in Russia's resource-rich borderlands occupy a uniquely inconvenient position for the state. Their claims — to territorial integrity, to environmental oversight, to consultation rights enshrined in international frameworks — directly intersect with the extraction economy that underwrites the federal budget and, increasingly, the war effort. Silencing these voices removes friction from the resource pipeline.

A Shrinking Space With Global Implications

The cases also carry implications for international climate governance. Indigenous representatives from Russia have historically played a role in multilateral forums, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change process, where they brought ground-level testimony about permafrost degradation, pipeline contamination, and the loss of traditional livelihoods. The criminalization of international cooperation — framing attendance at UN forums or collaboration with foreign NGOs as evidence of disloyalty — severs one of the last informational links between Russian environmental conditions and the global scientific and policy community.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. Across multiple authoritarian and semi-authoritarian contexts, environmental and Indigenous advocacy has been recast as a security concern. In several Latin American countries, land defenders face militarized responses. In parts of Southeast Asia, anti-mining activists have been charged under anti-terrorism frameworks. What distinguishes the Russian case is the scale of the state apparatus involved and the explicitness with which the Kremlin has folded environmental dissent into its broader narrative of foreign subversion.

Political scientists suggest these arrests function as a bellwether — a testing ground for repressive tactics that are eventually deployed against feminists, human rights lawyers, independent journalists, and other segments of a shrinking civil society. Each successful prosecution lowers the threshold for the next. The absence of significant domestic pushback, in a society where independent media has been largely dismantled, reduces the political cost of escalation.

The tension at the center of these cases is structural. Russia's northern territories are simultaneously among the most ecologically fragile regions on Earth and among the most economically strategic for the state. The people who know those landscapes most intimately — and who have the strongest legal and moral claims to stewardship — are now classified as enemies. Whether that classification holds without consequence, or whether international pressure and legal challenges create friction, remains the open question. For Egereva and Leongardt, the answer is not abstract.

With reporting from Grist.

Source · Grist