How far apart are Kyiv and the Russian opposition?

John Coale is a 79-year-old American lawyer, less high-profile than Steve Witkoff or Jared Kushner, but he too is one of the emissaries of the White House chief, Donald Trump. He has long been involved in Belarus, travelling frequently to Minsk and sharing vodka-fuelled dinners with the dictator Alyaksandr Lukashenka in an attempt to persuade him to release the political prisoners held in the regime’s jails. His mission was a success: around five hundred prisoners were released, and Lukashenka secured what he needed in return—the easing of sanctions and an agreement for the United States to purchase fertiliser. This is not the first time the Minsk regime has used prisoners as bargaining chips to give itself some economic breathing space. With every release, the Belarusian opposition rejoiced, yet remained aware that, for every prisoner out of jail, the regime’s life was being prolonged. Coale was recently appointed by Trump as special envoy for hostage affairs and now, as Simon Shuster writes in The Atlantic, he has proposed to the US president that the Belarusian method be applied to Moscow as well: offering the easing of sanctions in exchange for the release of political prisoners. The Kremlin, it seems, has already responded: spokesperson Dmitri Peskov said, with the same flippancy with which he always denies the very nature of the Russian regime, that the proposal is out of the question because there are no political prisoners in Russia. 

Shuster recounts that Coale’s proposal arose during a meeting with Dmitri Muratov, the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a Russian dissident and journalist, and co-founder of Novaya Gazeta. Muratov has remained in Russia, despite his newspaper having closed down due to the impossibility of reporting on the reality in Russia without calling a spade a spade – how can one write about war if the word ‘war’ is banned? He has suffered several physical attacks and has seen more and more people around him imprisoned. The opposition in Russia no longer exists; it is either in prison or abroad, where it often squabbles and splits into factions. Muratov had been following developments in Belarus and asked Shuster to introduce him to Coale to see whether Trump’s envoy could apply the same approach in Moscow as had been used in Minsk: fewer sanctions, more releases from prison. The dissident also provided Coale with a list of names, spoke about individual cases, and highlighted the spurious nature of the detentions. The meeting took place in the United States, and Muratov turned up with a precious gift: a medal that Mikhail Gorbachev had given him before his death, which Gorbachev himself had received from Ronald Reagan during one of their summits. In May, with the medal on the table at a private club, he recounted the success of prisoner exchanges during the Cold War and made it clear to Coale how urgent it was to make them a central focus of American policy once again. The American envoy liked the idea of working toward the release of prisoners; he said he was ready to commit himself, told Muratov about the feeling he had experienced after the first release – the sense of purpose he had felt in his life – and immediately spoke to Donald Trump about his possible new mission. The White House chief gave him a mandate to try, coordinating his efforts with Witkoff and Kushner, who had already been to Russia, inside the Kremlin, sitting at the table with Vladimir Putin, but without ever achieving results that brought peace in Ukraine any closer. Nor is Coale’s work destined to do so; on the contrary, it poses a risk.

Muratov opposes Russia’s war against Ukraine, but his request masks a conflict with Kyiv’s needs. There is always a point at which the paths of Ukrainians and Russian dissidents diverge; it happens often, and the rift is irreconcilable, but never with such a degree of delicacy and complexity. For Ukraine, easing sanctions on Russia means that Moscow will have more money and an even greater chance of keeping its war machine running, thereby dragging the conflict out even longer, whilst the economic damage to the regime will be delayed. For Ukraine, easing sanctions means more suffering, more death, and the loss of a lever to force Russia to negotiate. For the dissidents supporting Muratov’s initiative, it means seeing people released who were imprisoned for staging an anti-war protest, for a social media post, or for a message left on the shelves of a supermarket – people who risk dying in the Kremlin’s gulag. These are two worlds, looking in opposite directions. Trump’s desire for quick wins could, once again, favour the Russians rather than the Ukrainians.