Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, hundreds of thousands of Russians, possibly over a million, left their country. While many left for economic reasons—to avoid doing business under sanctions or because the companies they worked for relocated abroad—many others left due to ideological opposition to the war, increased persecution by the state, or fear of persecution. I ask how Russian political migrants during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine coped with their often-sudden exit from Russia, how and why they remain engaged in activist practices abroad, and how their collective identity is shaped by the context of their host countries. I argue that due to the conditions of wartime Russia, the precarity of migration, as well as the domestic political context of host countries, we cannot expect, as some scholars and analysts do, Russian political migrants to organize in the form of a classical social movement, or even in the ways that political migrants have previously been theorized about. Russian political migrants do not believe they have the capacity to overthrow Putin or end the war, nor do they lobby their host countries to apply pressure on Russia. Instead, continued political engagement is a matter of personal fulfilment, community building, and satisfying the compulsion to do something, even on a very small scale. Elucidating the subjectivity of these migrant Russians sheds light on how they understand themselves in relation to the state, how they resist its authoritarianism, and envision the political future for Russia. Doing so reveals how ordinary citizens dealt with the intense repression of the Russian regime prior to emigrating, as well as how they understand themselves and their own political agency in the post-Soviet periphery, spaces still grappling with the impacts of Russian and Soviet imperialism. This project is based on nine months of fieldwork in Armenia, Georgia, and Latvia from September 2022 to May 2023, during which I conducted in-depth interviews with 36 Russians from a variety of political and socio-economic backgrounds who emigrated from regions across Russia, as well as ethnographic observation of various protests and other political events in these field sites.