There is a particular kind of loss that has no ceremony. No date you can point to and say: this is when it ended. When Alexei Navalny died in a Russian Arctic prison colony in February 2024, we had that date. We had grief in a recognizable form. What is happening this week, as the Anti-Corruption Foundation he built tears itself apart in public, is the other kind. The slow, quiet realization that what you were waiting for is not coming. That the waiting itself was the last thing holding a certain version of your life together.

I have been in Israel since the war began. I was already abroad in February 2022 and made the decision not to return to Russia. I am one of over 83,000 who made aliyah since the invasion, joining a Russian-speaking community that already numbered around 1.3 million, roughly 15 percent of Israel’s population. Most of us arrived with the quiet assumption that this was provisional. That the opposition would succeed. That we would go back. That assumption is now dying.

This week, former FBK director Ivan Zhdanov gave a major interview to journalist Irina Shikhman, published May 10, accusing the foundation’s leadership of abandoning its founding principle — don’t lie and don’t steal — and alleging fictitious employees maintained for the personal benefit of political director Leonid Volkov. FBK presenter Irina Alleman had resigned days........

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