Arshak Makichyan has been called the world's “loneliest climate protester.” For two years he staged a one-person demonstration every Friday in central Moscow to urge the Russian government to do its part to address the climate crisis. During his solo protests, he was routinely harassed by passersby and the police. At one point, his climate advocacy led him to being jailed for six days.

Today the 28-year-old Makichyan faces a lonelier fate than he ever could've imagined. In March he was arrested for protesting Russia's invasion of Ukraine and shortly thereafter left Moscow for Berlin. Then this spring, prosecutors in Moscow moved to strip Makichyan, who was born in Armenia, of his Russian citizenship, which would leave him stateless and unable to return to Russia. He calls the case an attempt to intimidate him and other activists.

“This past year it felt like my personal civil war against the Putin regime, because all the people in our movement stopped going out on the streets, and once again I was going out by myself,” he said. “Now I'm lonely again, standing on my own against this court case, because it’s this kind of personal case against me, even though there are lots of Armenians in Russia.”

When Makichyan began his climate advocacy three years ago, the effort seemed impossibly hard. Now, in hindsight and amid a brutal war, he realizes how much simpler it was then. 

In 2019 Makichyan was a student of violin at Moscow's prestigious music conservatory. Studying music was a dream he’d had since childhood, when his family moved from Armenia to the Russian capital. As he considered continuing his musical education abroad, Makichyan started reading Twitter to improve his English. He happened to see a tweet about Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teen who had started picketing her nation’s parliament by herself. He became curious about climate activism, something he understood “even less than English.” 

His first experience with environmental activism was underwhelming. In March 2019, environmental groups put together a demonstration in Moscow as part of the Global Climate Strike. The gathering was nothing like the massive protests in Europe, Australia, and the United States. Moscow officials allowed the rally to go ahead only in a park where almost no one would notice it, and fewer than 50 people showed up.

Makichyan to wanted to do more by staging some kind of protest in the city center. The problem was that arrest would be certain. But single-person picketing, he learned by reading Russia's laws on demonstrations, was permitted without official approval. 

So just a few weeks after his first environmental rally, Makichyan walked to the front of the bronze monument to poet Alexander Pushkin in Moscow's busy Pushkin Square and held up a piece of cardboard with the words “For the Paris agreement! Against the genocide of nature!” scrawled in cursive. The next Friday he was back again. And the Friday after that, and the one after that, as he continued his one-person version of the Fridays for Future student walkouts. 

His solo protest was riskier than what Fridays for Future participants in the West experience. Police questioned him, checked his documents, and on half a dozen occasions arrested him. Though some passersby offered encouraging words, others yelled at him. Less than half of Russians see global warming as a threat, and Vladimir Putin once infamously joked that with rising temperatures, Russians would be able to “spend less on fur coats.” State television lionizes oil and gas production, which makes up about 40 percent of the government’s revenues.

At one point, his parents urged him to abandon activism. He took solace in rewatching his favorite Harry Potter movies. “It's calming to watch one film over and over again when you understand everything will end well,” he said.

As the months passed, Makichyan started to gain recognition—both from the media and the authorities. Immediately after he returned from speaking alongside Thunberg at the UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid in December 2019, he was jailed for six days for violating public-gathering rules. Unknown men started following him around, he said.

But Makichyan also began making connections with other youth activists, and sporadic Fridays for Future pickets started popping up in a handful of Russian cities. “As a sign for other climate activists, it was very important there was at least someone,” said journalist Angelina Davydova, who has covered Russian environmental issues since 2009. “In a way, he showed it was possible.”

In September 2019 Russia, the world's fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter, finally approved the Paris Agreement and started drafting a national climate change adaptation plan. Not long after that, Makichyan and other Fridays for Future activists managed to get a meeting with Putin's climate representative, Ruslan Edelgeriyev, during which they demanded more ambitious plans to cut Russia's greenhouse gas emissions. Edelgeriyev promised to pass these demands on to the president, but Russia later adopted a climate strategy that would actually increase industrial emissions.

By 2021 the Kremlin had tightened the screws on dissent even further, imprisoning opposition leader Alexei Navalny—who was poisoned and nearly died the year before—and outlawing his network of anti-corruption activists. Makichyan stopped his string of Friday pickets and announced he was running for parliament as a candidate of an embattled liberal party. “It's impossible to only talk about climate and the environment when people are being poisoned with military nerve agents,” he said in his campaign video. In the end, Makichyan wasn't allowed on the ballot, but he kept agitating for political freedoms as a prerequisite for climate activism.

Putin's invasion of Ukraine closed what little space was left for protest in Russia. The invasion happened on the day of Makichyan's wedding to fellow activist Polina Oleinikova. He went to his wedding in a white shirt with “Fuck the War” written on it. The next day, the newlyweds were detained while leaving their apartment for a demonstration. The word war has since been banned in Russia, and more than 15,000 people have been arrested.

“Before it was really scary. Now when the war has begun and they're calling you a traitor of the motherland, it's just unbearable,” Makichyan said.

In March he and Oleinikova fled Russia, traveling by bus through Belarus and Poland to Germany, where they have engaged in protests calling for an oil embargo on Russia. In late May the European Union agreed to cut its purchases of Russian crude by 90 percent this year, but the EU “temporarily” exempted oil imports via pipeline and still buys 380 million cubic meters of Russian natural gas a day. Makichyan continues to demand a complete shutoff, pointing out that the war is largely funded by Moscow's record sales of oil and gas to Europe. 

He originally planned to return to Russia once economic sanctions began to bite, to try to start a new opposition movement. But an acquaintance tipped him off that a legal case had been opened involving him. Reading the court files on his phone, he was shocked to find that he could lose his citizenship for supposedly providing false personal information when he became a naturalized Russian citizen in 2004.

“It's a clear attempt to punish him for leading the climate movement before 2022 and for his actions and the political positions he expresses, including his antiwar position,” Makichyan's lawyer, Olga Podoplelova, said.

Makichyan is talking with Russian activists about trying to start an “antiwar environmental movement” and is promoting social media campaigns against the Kremlin. But his future is cloudy. “More than anything,” he said, “I hope that I will be able to go back to Russia.”

As it stands, that probably won't happen until Putin is forced out of power—something that will require much more than a single-person picket.