Liudmila Listrovaya is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan’s Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia.
On 17 December 2025, Russian security forces temporarily detained 17 Indigenous activists, raided their houses, and confiscated their devices. Two activists were arrested, including the Selkup Indigenous rights defender Daria Egereva, a co-chair of the International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC). Authorities accused her of participating in a “terrorist organization,” a charge that can carry a prison sentence of up to 20 years. Egereva’s arrest signals a wider message: participation in global climate and human-rights arenas can be recast as suspect behavior at home, especially when it foregrounds Indigenous claims about land, health, and pollution.
What makes the case especially revealing is not only its severity, but its logic. The targeted activists had presented detailed evidence of Indigenous rights violations and environmental crisis in Russia in international arenas, including UN venues. Egereva’s work has been linked to climate and Indigenous advocacy, including participation in the most recent COP30 meeting in Brazil.
In today’s Russia, this kind of advocacy is increasingly treated not as civic engagement, but as a political threat. What follows is not just an environmental story, but a story about governance and how the Russian state manages territory, money, and dissent in an extractive economy under wartime conditions.
The extractive bargain: the periphery produces, the center collects
Russia is an extraction-powered state. Oil, gas, metals, and minerals shape both the federal budget and the country’s strategic imagination. When a government depends heavily on resource rents, it tends to defend extraction not just as economic activity but as national necessity. This dependence is paired with a geographic reality: extraction is concentrated far from Moscow, in regions that are sparsely populated, politically distant, and often disproportionately Indigenous or ethnically diverse. These territories supply the raw materials; the political center supplies the rules. When extraction is framed as national resilience, local demands for cleanup, consultation, or reparations become easier to dismiss as obstruction.
Over the past two decades, those rules have increasingly favored fiscal centralization. Regional shares of key extractive taxes have shrunk, while the federal center has increased its take. The result is a familiar center-periphery pattern: the periphery bears the ecological costs, while the center captures most of the revenue. It is a system that produces what we might call “sacrifice zones” by design and not by accident.
“Internal colonialism” with contemporary numbers
The idea that Moscow governs frontiers as resource peripheries is not new. Scholars have long used the term “internal colonization” to describe, among other things, Soviet-era development that exploited ethnic minority regions and remote territories for the benefit of the core. Strikingly, contemporary data lines up with that older spatial hierarchy.
Recent research comparing Russian regions suggests that officially designated traditional Indigenous territories experience dramatically higher atmospheric pollution from extraction than other regions—approximately 175% higher. Ethnic diversity generally amplifies extraction’s polluting impact: as extractive activity increases, more diverse regions may experience worse pollution. The point is not that diversity “causes” pollution, but that extraction and political marginality often overlap geographically. Put simply: some populations are more likely to live where pollution is heaviest, and those places are often the ones least able to bargain with Moscow.
Because Russian public life, and much of the world’s coverage, still runs through Moscow and a few other major cities, the realities of extraction, pollution, and repression in the far-flung regions where many Indigenous communities live are easy to miss, even though they can tell us a great deal about how the state actually governs. In Russia’s oil-and-gas heartlands, pollution is not a distant consequence, but one of life’s background conditions. Pollution from extraction and production of natural resources can result in extreme contamination and dramatic risks to health, including birth defects and cancers.
In some areas in Western Siberia, concentrations of trace elements exceed background levels by up to 111 times. In Khanty-Mansi AO, one of Russia’s most important oil-producing regions, the landscape is severely contaminated, with up to 93% of water bodies in the region are affected by spills, discharges, and heavy metals linked to industrial activity. Over 3 million people in Russia are at risk due to the hazardous pollution of soils and waters, with close to one third of all toxic sites contaminated with lead, arsenic, and cadmium. The situation with air quality is similarly dire: according to the data from the late 1990s, 219,000-233,000 premature deaths or 15–17% of Russia’s total annual mortality might have been caused by air pollution.
For many northern Indigenous communities, environmental harm is not only a matter of toxins, but also a threat to cultural survival. Industrial contaminants can move through Arctic ecosystems and accumulate in food chains with diets based on fish, marine mammals, or reindeer, all foods tied to tradition and identity. In coastal Chukotka, as much as 90% of the total health risk from exposure to persistent organic pollutants is connected to traditional Indigenous diets. In that context, telling people to “avoid local food” can mean abandoning practices that organize community life. In this way, environmental pollution comes to disrupt cultures.
Norilsk: a disaster that revealed a fiscal logic of internal colonialism
If regional snapshots show the scale of harm, the Norilsk diesel spill shows how the aftermath can be governed. In May 2020, a Norilsk Nickel fuel tank failed, spilling 21,000 tons of diesel into Arctic waterways. This catastrophe, one of the largest industrial accidents in modern Russian history, became globally legible when Arctic rivers ran red-brown.
In the months that followed, the State Duma hastily passed amendments relating to compensation for environmental damage, redirecting all compensation for the pollution of water bodies to the federal budget effective 1 January 2021. By 2024, Norilsk Nickel had paid a 145-billion-ruble penalty, yet only a small portion of these funds flowed back to the affected region, the rest was appropriated by Moscow. This example shows that environmental harm not only damages local ecosystems, but can also generate revenue streams—which are rerouted away from affected regions to the benefit of the center.
After 2022: protecting extraction, shrinking civic space
Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, environmental protest in Russia was constrained but visible. People mobilized against landfills, deforestation, toxic waste, and industrial expansion. After 2022, the political atmosphere changed sharply. The state’s reliance on extractive revenues deepened, while civic space narrowed. Organizations shuttered, relocated, or were overtaken by the government. Independent advocacy became easier to frame as disloyalty, especially when it intersected with international networks or human-rights language.
While repression is often imagined as spectacle—raids, arrests, long sentences—in practice, some of the most consequential pressure arrives through rules that sound merely technical. One of the clearest examples of this phenomenon is the transformation of public environmental expertise, which historically allowed civil society participation in environmental review processes.
Over time, the government has excluded more and more potential participants in this form of expertise, culminating in the 2023 amendments excluding individuals or organizations labeled “foreign agents.” The state’s assault on independent expertise reached a further peak with the February 2026 accusation of high treason against scientist Alexey Dudarev, who spent decades documenting the toll of environmental pollution on Indigenous health.
This strategy is politically powerful precisely because it is procedural. By proceeding in this way, the state ensures that it never outright bans expressions of environmental concern. Instead, it simply prevents certain people from participating in the formal channels where environmental harm is documented and contested. Once the gate closes on legal scrutiny, activists and communities are pushed toward informal or international venues. This move, in turn, can then be used to justify accusations of foreign influence.
From advocacy to “terrorism”: the security turn
Indigenous activists’ detentions, raided houses, confiscated devices, and arrests sit inside a broader reclassification of activism. In contemporary Russia, the category “terrorism” has expanded far beyond its ordinary meaning. “Extremist” or “terrorist” status can now be applied to groups whose core activity is speech, association, or advocacy, especially when that advocacy challenges state priorities. As of January 2025, over 172 Indigenous and decolonial groups have been designated “terrorist organizations.” This designation instantly raises the cost of association, expands surveillance latitude, and turns ordinary collaboration into prosecutable risk. The state can claim not merely that it disagrees with the activist, but that it is defending society from an existential danger.
This rhetoric makes environmental and Indigenous advocacy an especially sensitive target. Extraction is certainly a business, but it is also a pillar of state capacity. When extraction becomes politically protected, resistance becomes easier to criminalize. Labeling environmental justice work “terrorism” is a way of reorganizing governance by controlling who may speak, who may represent communities, and who may link local harm to national priorities.
Taken together, these dynamics point to a governing pattern. Extraction concentrates harm in peripheral territories, many of them Indigenous or ethnically diverse. Fiscal rules channel a large share of benefits upward. Legal mechanisms that once allowed civic scrutiny are narrowed through procedural exclusions. And when resistance persists, security labels provide the state with maximally coercive tools.
This is not a story about specific “bad companies” or “bad laws” alone, this story reveals how the state manages the relationship between revenue, territory, and political control, especially under wartime pressures. When environmental justice becomes a security target, the result is not fewer environmental problems, but fewer ways to name and measure them, and fewer mechanisms that might compel the state to respond.
