Dependent Representation

Who speaks on behalf of Russia's Indigenous peoples at international forums

Starting from the 1990s, representatives of Russia’s Indigenous peoples gradually became integrated into the international system for protecting Indigenous rights, primarily through UN mechanisms. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, UN platforms on Indigenous peoples did not close to Russia. Russian representatives retained participation in three key mechanisms: the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP), and the processes of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Arctida, together with The Insider, set out to determine who actually speaks on behalf of Russia's Indigenous peoples at these forums, and whose interests they truly represent.

Representatives of the security services

The substantive content of Russia’s position at international forums on Indigenous issues is largely shaped by the Federal Agency for Ethnic Affairs (FADN). The agency was established in 2015 to develop and implement state ethnic policies. At the time, the real logic behind its creation was driven mainly by the goal of maintaining interethnic stability in the North Caucasus; still, the rights of the Indigenous minority peoples of the North, Siberia, and the Far East were also among the agency’s priorities, and over time came to occupy a more prominent place in its work. Today, it is FADN representatives who head the Russian delegation at UNPFII sessions, who act as a partner of the School of Public Diplomacy, which trains “international representatives” of Indigenous peoples, and who distribute federal subsidies under the Implementation of State Ethnic Policies program among NGOs working in this field.

Since its founding, FADN has been headed by Igor Barinov. Before entering government service, he was a career FSB officer: from 1993 he served in the Alpha counterterrorist unit in the Sverdlovsk Region, rising to the group commander, and took part in operations in North Ossetia and Chechnya. From 2003 to 2015, Barinov was a State Duma member, serving on the Defense Committee, until his appointment in April 2015 as head of the new, “peaceful” agency.

The staffing structure Barinov built within the agency largely reflects his own security-services background. Barinov’s first deputy, Stanislav Bedkin, holds the military rank of colonel; in other people's phone contacts he appears under the name “Stas 2 Service.”

In the professional jargon of the security services, the Second Service refers to the FSB’s Service for the Protection of the Constitutional Order and Combating Terrorism. Barinov’s advisor Mikhail Mishin is not officially listed on FADN’s website, but he appears in the organization’s payroll records obtained by Arctida as the head of the situation center of the House of the Peoples of Russia; his military ID was issued by the FSB’s 10th Directorate.

Besides FSB personnel, FADN’s structure includes people from the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) and the Ministry of Defense. Before joining the agency, the head of the department for protecting state secrets Evgeny Prokoptsov served at the Senezh Special Purpose Center, one of the most secretive units of Russia’s Special Operations Forces. His subordinate Nikolai Martyntsev began his career within the Main Missile and Artillery Directorate of the Ministry of Defense, later moving to the Financial and Economic Activity Directorate of the Ministry of Defense’s central apparatus. Alexander Tereshkin, who previously headed the Department for Analysis, Forecasting, and Work with Foreign Citizens, before joining FADN worked in the Special Communications Unit of the Federal Guard Service (FSO) and the 4th Central Research Institute of the Ministry of Defense, a leading institute for the development of strategic missile weapons.

Some leadership positions at FADN are held by people from Yekaterinburg, the city tied to Barinov's own career background. Some of them have indirect ties to security services. Before moving to Moscow, the head of the Administrative Department Evgeny Polezhaev worked at the Sverdlovsk Region Ministry for the Management of State Property. His father is a special-forces veteran who had met Barinov before his work in Yekaterinburg. The House of the Peoples of Russia is headed by Anna Polezhaeva, Evgeny's ex-wife, also a native of Yekaterinburg. Her deputy, Olga Nosyreva, worked with Evgeny Polezhaev in the Sverdlovsk Region administration; she appears in other people’s phone contacts as Barinov’s assistant.

Based on our analysis of FADN personnel data, at least 13 agency employees have ties to the FSB, GRU, FSO, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Ministry of Defense. It is precisely these key FADN staff members who represent Russia at the main international forums on Indigenous peoples’ rights.

Barinov regularly heads the Russian delegation at sessions of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues: for example, in May, at the Forum’s 25th session, he stated in his address that Western sanctions against Russia are having a negative effect on the lives of Indigenous peoples.

“Independent” experts

Participation in UN mechanisms on Indigenous issues is possible through two tracks. On one hand, states send official delegations and nominate experts to governing bodies. Alongside this, there is a civil society track, under which representatives are nominated directly by Indigenous organizations. They are supposed to be independent of governments and corporations so that, when necessary, they can serve as a counterweight to official state delegations.

One of the most prominent civil society experts from Russia for many years has been Alexey Tsykarev, an international human rights expert from Karelia. From 2013 to 2019, he was a member of the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples under the UN Human Rights Council, including serving as vice-chair and chair. In 2020–2022, Tsykarev became an independent expert on the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues representing the Eastern Europe, Russia, Central Asia, and Transcaucasia region.

At the Permanent Forum’s 22nd session in 2023, Tsykarev presented a previously commissioned study on the principle of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), the international standard requiring companies to obtain the consent of Indigenous communities before beginning industrial activity on their lands. The report presented three cases from Russian practice as examples of global best practice: the resettlement of Nenets people from the Taymyr settlement of Tukhard, organized by Nornickel; the construction of an LNG plant on Nenets lands in Yamal by the Yamal LNG consortium; and a five-year Indigenous support program for Sakhalin developed by Sakhalin Energy.

Read more

about how industrial activity affects Russia’s Indigenous peoples in Arctida’s report.

Indigenous Rights Under Development

The positive portrayal of Nornickel in Tsykarev's UN report is no coincidence. In September 2024, the company's Board of Directors approved an updated Indigenous peoples engagement policy, one of whose authors was Tsykarev himself. According to him, the consultants visited settlements in Taymyr and Murmansk Region twice, and the company management largely approved their proposals. Nornickel is also the general sponsor of the School of Public Diplomacy for the Indigenous Minority Peoples of Russia, a joint project of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), RAIPON, and FADN aimed at training young leaders who will represent Indigenous peoples’ interests at the federal and international level. Tsykarev serves as the School’s program director.

The Karelian expert is also closely tied to the Soyuz Union of Indigenous Minority Peoples, headed by Antonina Gorbunova, his successor as a member of the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The two frequently speak at the same events. According to financial transaction data obtained by Arctida, between 2021 and 2025 Soyuz received 91.8 million rubles from Nornickel — roughly 63% of the organization's entire budget over that period. Moreover, a fifth of all of Soyuz’s expenditures ultimately ended up in Tsykarev’s own accounts: over the same period he was paid 21.1 million rubles, both as a private individual and as a sole proprietor, for “expertise” or “consulting services.” In 2021, he received 1.4 million rubles from the organization; by 2024 this had risen to 6.6 million, and in 2025, to 8.4 million. Over four years his income from Soyuz grew sixfold, even though the organization's overall budget remained essentially unchanged.

Thus, Tsykarev, who presented himself at UN forums as an “independent” expert, spent several years receiving steady payments from an organization whose budget consists of nearly two-thirds Nornickel funding — the very company he publicly held up as a model of best practice in engaging with Indigenous peoples.

There is one more notable detail in Tsykarev's biography: in 2018 he was denied a Finnish visa, with national security concerns cited as the official reason. Estonia later made a similar visa decision.

Voices that go unheard

Appearances at international UN forums by Russian representatives closely tied to security services and extractive companies come against the backdrop of ongoing repression of Indigenous activists. In December of last year, Daria Egereva was arrested in Moscow. She is a representative of the Selkup people, a human rights defender and climate activist who for many years represented the interests of Russia's Indigenous peoples at international UN forums.

In 2023, the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change elected her co-chair, and it was in this role that she led Indigenous participation at the COP30 climate conference in Brazil. Less than a month after the conference ended, Egereva was arrested on charges of participating in a “terrorist organization” — a designation given to the Aborigen Forum, an expert network that included the Center for Support of Indigenous Minority Peoples of the North, which she had previously represented. On the same day Egereva was arrested, security services also persecuted at least 17 other activists in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), St. Petersburg, Altai, Kuzbass, and the Murmansk and Tomsk regions. In late April, the Moscow City Court heard an appeal against the extension of her detention; Yegereva took part in the hearing via video link from pretrial detention center SIZO-6. The court upheld the ruling.

Egereva's lawyer, Olga Podoplelova, calls it “legally absurd”: Aborigen Forum engaged in peaceful expert and research work, was never part of any other organization, and had disbanded itself even before being designated as a “terrorist organization”.

“This case itself should be viewed in the broader context of pressure on independent Indigenous movements,”

According to her, the criminalization of the Aborigen Forum and the personal prosecution of Yegereva fit within a policy of pushing out independent voices in favor of state-controlled structures.

These words are corroborated by structural changes in the composition of international representative bodies. In February 2025, under the auspices of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the Cali Fund was launched — a financial mechanism aimed at the fair distribution of benefits from the commercial use of nature and at supporting global biodiversity conservation goals. According to activist Pavel Sulyandziga, Daria Egereva was Russia's “candidate number one” for the fund’s Steering Committee, given that among Indigenous activists she specialized precisely in biodiversity issues.

In the end, however, the fund’s leadership came to include international human rights expert and Karelian activist Alexey Tsykarev. In April, it also became known that he would receive a grant from the Arctic Development Project Office to conduct a study on mechanisms for protecting the traditional knowledge of Indigenous minority peoples, which is to be presented at the 17th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP17) in October. Daria Egereva used to take part in such conferences.

Thus, in the Russian case, international mechanisms created to allow indigenous peoples to speak independently of states and extractive companies have been largely co-opted by the Russian authorities.

This does not mean that independent indigenous voices from Russia are entirely absent from the international arena, but the repression of activists shows that the space for free representation is shrinking.

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Cover photo by ognjen1234 / Depositphotos

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