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Moscow has designated the Antiwar Committee of Russia as a terrorist movement, and its activities have been banned nationwide, according to a report by the state-controlled news agency TASS citing the Russian Supreme Court.
In a motion preceding the decision, the Prosecutor General’s Office said the “Antiwar Committee of Russia movement” was created “for the purpose of violently seizing power and changing the constitutional order in the Russian Federation.”
The Prosecutor General’s Office had already designated the Antiwar Committee as an “undesirable” organization, announcing that decision in January 2024 after the group’s activities were reported to the authorities by State Duma MP Andrei Lugovoi — a former security services officer whom British officials suspect of playing a key role in the murder-by-polonium of ex-FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.
As noted by Deutsche Welle, the Supreme Court’s ruling was issued by Judge Oleg Nefyodov — the same justice who previously declared the nonexistent “international LGBT movement” and “international satanism movement” to be “extremist” in Russia; he also designated the late Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) as a “terrorist organization.” In addition, it was Nefyodov who rejected multiple lawsuits filed by Navalny against Russia’s Ministry of Justice and who barred independent candidates Boris Nadezhdin and Yekaterina Duntsova from running in the 2024 presidential election.
In October 2025, the FSB announced terrorism charges against 23 members of the Antiwar Committee, including opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, former world chess champion and prominent Kremlin critic Garry Kasparov, entrepreneur Evgeny Chichvarkin, economist Sergei Guriev, political scientist and public intellectual Ekaterina Schulmann, and Novaya Gazeta Europe editor-in-chief Kirill Martynov.
According to the FSB, Khodorkovsky and other committee members “called for the liquidation of the current Russian government.” The FSB cited as evidence the Berlin Declaration adopted in 2023 by the Antiwar Committee, which describes Russia’s current authorities as “illegitimate and criminal.”
The press release relating to the individual terrorism charges also referred to the committee’s initiative to create a platform for the Russian opposition within the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). The FSB claims the initiative was presented as a “constituent assembly for a transitional period and an alternative to the authorities of the Russian Federation.”
The composition of the platform — envisioned as a place for dialogue with “exiled Russian democratic forces” — was approved by PACE on Jan. 26. It includes 10 well-known opposition figures and five members representing Russia’s Indigenous peoples.
The Antiwar Committee itself was created by Khodorkovsky in February 2022, shortly after the Kremlin unleashed its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Its projects include Kovcheg (lit. “The Ark”), an organization that helps emigrants who left Russia due to the war, the humanitarian aid group Rassvet (lit. “Dawn”), which is focused on helping Ukraine, and Komitet Deistviya (lit. “Action Committee”), a rights defense coordination group aiding anti-war Russian citizens.