Boris B. Nadezhdin, one of the last remaining opposition politicians in Russia who was both fervently against the war in Ukraine and not sitting in prison for his beliefs, announced on Monday that he had fled the country.
Standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, Mr. Nadezhdin, 63, is shown in a video saying that he was “alive and free, but, unfortunately, not yet in Russia.”
Reached by The New York Times on Monday, he said he needed to solve “everyday issues” before he could discuss his escape or his plans.
Mr. Nadezhdin’s surname means “hope” in Russian. But his departure from politics means antiwar Russians have one fewer advocate in the country’s ever-shrinking public sphere.
He had been planning to run in upcoming elections for the lower house of Parliament, known as the Duma, in September, the first such ballot since President Vladimir V. Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine.
Mr. Nadezhdin’s first campaign pledge was to advocate for an end to the “Special Military Operation,” as the war is called in Russia. His campaign website listed his priorities as “peace,” “freedom of speech,” “cooperation” and “fair elections,” with the words “militarism,” “isolation of Russia” and “Putin’s power vertical” crossed out.
But only days after he started collecting signatures, he was barred from running in the elections. Last month, he was designated a “foreign agent,” blocking him from teaching or holding office. Days later, masked men took him to a police station and eventually accused him of displaying “extremist” symbols because of a video he had appeared in that briefly showed a photograph of the deceased politician Aleksei A. Navalny.
Mr. Nadezhdin was barred from leaving the country days after he publicly said he was thinking of fleeing into exile.
“Unlike Navalny, I am an elderly and quite sick person; I would fade away” in prison, he said in an interview in his apartment in the Moscow suburb of Dolgoprudny in May. He mentioned having heart problems and said he intended to remain alive and free because of his four children, two of whom are minors.
A political operator since the 1990s with connections to the Kremlin’s top spin doctor, Mr. Nadezhdin had campaigned against Mr. Putin for president in 2024. He was eventually kept off the ballot by the Central Election Commission, but he was not pursued in court.
In another interview last month, he said the case against him for extremism had shown how nervous the Kremlin was about any dissenting voice at a time when Russians were frustrated by soaring prices, tax hikes, inflation, internet restrictions and a war that was increasingly being felt at home.
Other antiwar politicians have also faced pressure in Russia. The Central Election Commission allowed the liberal-leaning Yabloko party to register for the elections, but it has prevented its candidates from running for local parliaments in places like St. Petersburg and the neighboring Karelia region, where it has a large voter base.
A dozen members of Yabloko face or have faced criminal charges, though some were forced to pay fines. The party’s deputy leader, Maxim Kruglov, was convicted of spreading falsehoods about the Russian military in June over posts he wrote on social media in 2022 and sentenced to seven years in prison.
The same month, Vladimir Sorokin, a Yabloko member from Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea, was sentenced to one year in prison for donating 500 rubles ($6) in 2021 to an “extremist organization.” In July, another party member from Moscow, Elena Perepelitsa, was put in pretrial detention for a similar offense.
In the interview in May, Mr. Nadezhdin spoke of his belief that one person could have an outsize effect in politics, even in a country like Russia, where power is so centralized. He remembered his formative years, the late 1980s and early ’90s, when Mikhail Gorbachev ushered in an era of “glasnost” and “perestroika” — openness and restructuring. He said that Mr. Putin and the people around him remembered the period as well, but with fear of it repeating.
“Literally a few people” critical of the Soviet system got into Parliament, he said. “Among whom was Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov,” he added, referring to the Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and Nobel laureate.
“He started speaking there, and the entire country’s eyes and ears opened just like that,” he said. “They are afraid the same thing will happen. It is important to them that there is not a single person in the Duma who criticizes Putin and the war.”
Mr. Nadezhdin said he knew that his theory sounded “hard to believe,” but “in 1985, no one could have even imagined that the Soviet Union might crumble.”
Alina Lobzina contributed reporting.
