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MOSCOW — Russia may jail its own separatists, but that did not hinder a nominally independent Russian organization from laying out the welcome mat on Sunday for an oddball, global troupe of liberation movements, including, improbably, four from the United States.
The official name of the government-funded gathering, held within sight of the Kremlin, was “The Dialogue of Nations.” Its stated goal was to affirm the right to self-determination while demonizing globalization.
The unofficial goal seemed to be to support groups, however marginal, that might help rattle Western governments. The main talking points, particularly those vilifying the United States for the violent aftermath of uprisings in the Middle East and Ukraine, echoed a standard Kremlin argument.
Nate Smith, a 36-year-old country-music performer and information-technology consultant representing a group called the Texas Nationalist Movement, summed up the theme of the conference.
“We have gathered from around the world to discuss the principle and the future of self-determination in direct contradiction to those seeking a global solution to the people of the world,” he told the conference. “Much like the people of Catalonia, the people of Ireland, the people of Puerto Rico and many other peoples that are represented at this conference, we believe that the best people to govern Texas is the Texan people.”
Participants praised the so-called Brexit vote to take Britain out of the European Union as the new lodestar of those seeking self-determination.
The Kremlin paid a chunk of the cost for the gathering of about a dozen international groups. “We are not poor,” said Alexander V. Ionov, the president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, which organized the gathering for the second consecutive year.
It was impossible to determine what level of Kremlin support the conference attracted, and Mr. Ionov declined to elaborate beyond confirming the receipt of a presidential grant, but the external signs indicated nothing elaborate.
True, the conference moved from the President Hotel, a favorite of regional governors in town for Kremlin meetings, to the far fancier Ritz-Carlton, a few hundred yards from the Kremlin walls. It is the kind of place where John Kerry, the secretary of state, stays in Moscow. Yet the universal samovars dispensing tea at such gatherings took several hours to materialize. There was no lunch.
No Russian secessionist organizations were invited, but there were numerous representatives from the small states involved in the frozen conflicts that Russia stokes along its borders to ensure that countries like Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Azerbaijan and Armenia do not fall entirely out of its orbit.
Map | Frozen Zones: How Russia Maintains Influence in the Post-Cold War Era Modern Russia has inflamed conflict in former Soviet republics to create “frozen zones,” allowing it to influence events and confound its opponents.
Mr. Ionov, who evoked Gandhi as a role model in calling for peaceful independence transitions, described Russian separatists as terrorists funded from abroad. “They are mostly created artificially, or they are marginal,” he said. (Any Russian advocating secession from Moscow’s rule faces five years in jail.)
Marginal did not seem to matter when inviting others.
The Talysh Revival Movement? It is an Iranian minority within Azerbaijan. The National Sovereign State of Borinken? It wants to take Puerto Rico back to its political status in 1508. How about the king of Hawaii? The self-proclaimed king, Edmund Keli’i Silver Jr., sent in a video statement calling for international solidarity against global warming.
About the only widely recognized participant was a representative of the Republican Sinn Fein, the breakaway branch of the Irish political organization and one still striving to free Northern Ireland from British rule. Representatives of two political parties well known in their native Lebanon were also present. They were not separatists but supporters, like Moscow, of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
It was hard to determine whether the Russians were unaware just how marginal many of these groups were, or knew but did not care, figuring that support for any voices of dissent abroad was a means of extending Russian influence.
Mr. Ionov, for example, said such groups, once they understood the Russian viewpoint, might lobby at home for the removal of Western economic sanctions imposed after the Kremlin annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 — presented here as legal autonomy, though Ukraine had no say.
“I think the information that they transmit might make this possible,” Mr. Ionov said, while conceding that lifting sanctions probably was not a priority for any of them.
Mr. Ionov also pushed the idea that some groups, like the Texas Nationalist Movement, seemed to be attracting more adherents since they got on Russia’s radar.
Mr. Smith of the Texas Nationalist Movement described its supporters as the fruit of a decade of work, and he dismissed the idea that his appearance might be construed as backing Russia’s anti-American propaganda.
“The U.S. foreign policy does not reflect the will of Texas,” he said. “Right now, the people of Texas do not have the opportunity to express their own foreign policy.”
The representative of another American separatist cause at the gathering, Louis J. Marinelli of California, hopes to get an independence referendum on the ballot, to be free of the “shackles of statehood,” as he put it.
Mr. Marinelli, like many participants, said he was thrilled that a fully paid trip to Moscow afforded him a moment of media exposure that he rarely got at home.
Both the Texas and California representatives said their biggest hope for new support came from the presidential election in November. “People just have to hear that Donald Trump might get elected, and they are on board,” Mr. Marinelli said.
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