“Russia is the biggest exporter of corruption”

Main host of the Russian opponent’s network sentenced to three and a half years in prison after surviving a poisoning attempt, this 40-year-old strategist has been living in Lithuania for two years. In August, the Russian courts again opened an investigation against him for financing a “Extremist organization”.

Read also Article reserved for our subscribers In Lithuania, Russian opposition debates survival

What news do you have from Alexeï Navalny?

Well, he’s in jail. We communicate through lawyers. We can just “get” a few messages from him outside. He’s on a life sentence, whether it’s his own or Putin’s, because, of course, Putin will never want to release him. His goal was to poison and kill him, but he failed. In many ways, Putin fails.

But Russian society is changing. A lot. The last legislative elections [en septembre] have shown it well. If you compare them to the previous ones, in 2016, or to the presidential election of 2018, everyone saw that major frauds were taking place, but, there, the Russians realized that Putin no longer had a real representative majority, and his popularity is no longer the same. When he went to shoot manly images somewhere in the taiga, with his defense minister, Sergei Choïgou, people liked it, he didn’t go on vacation to the Seychelles. Today, it doesn’t work anymore, because Putin always does the same thing. It is all the more uncomfortable for him since he used to be loved and he doesn’t know how to turn the situation around.

Is the Sakharov Prize awarded by the European Parliament to Alexeï Navalny an encouragement for you?

This award is deserved. And this is very important, because it reflects a pan-European consensus and support for all the work of Alexei and his team.

What do you expect from the West?

One: be more severe with Putin, do not hope to come to terms with him and finally understand that any sign of appeasement will be considered by Putin as a sign of weakness. In any attempt to compromise, he will see a victory. Macron, like Biden says “we have to talk with Putin” on Syria, Afghanistan, climate change, on all global issues. But this approach lacks logic. Russia is not meeting any of its obligations. It sits on the UN Security Council, it is a member of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, of the Council of Europe, and it does not apply any rules. In Crimea, it did not respect international law, in Donbass, it does not apply the Minsk agreements. What more does the West need?

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