The EU/Nordic higher education policies encourage internationalisation with the post-socialist countries without democratic traditions in higher education or other meaning of them. In their turn, these post-socialist countries and their policy stakeholders implement their own internationalisation policies using EU/Nordic policies ambiguously. In significant extent, these policies and their implementations follow similar patterns/models previously had been developed in Russia despite their failure. Svetlana Shenderova discusses, why and how the intersect of internationalisation policies exacerbated growing nationalism and inequality in Russian academia and society, summarises (un)learnt lessons of Russia’s membership in the Bologna Process in 2003-2022, and their impact on further improvement of internationalisation policies with post-socialist non-democracies in the future.