“Vladimir Putin shortened his rule in the Ukraine war”

Leonid Volkov, the right-wing man in the opposition, says the elite around President Vladimir Putin is weakened and increasingly divided by sanctions, which increases the chances of a plot to end the Russian leader and open the door to democratization of the country. Chairman Alexei Navalny.

In an interview with Efe while attending the Human Rights and Democracy Conference in Geneva, Volkov promised that the traditional annual meeting of dissidents in the exiled Swiss city of Lithuania would reduce Putin’s chances of staying in power for life. His big plan was.

For the past decade, Volkov insists that “through war, the probability of staying in power until his death has dramatically diminished, while the other two possible avenues have increased: the conspiracy of his inner circle or a popular uprising.” His election campaigns before Navalny was arrested.

With the threat of up to 15 years in prison for fighting the war, Volkov sees the plot in Putin’s circle of hope as the most viable option to end a president who loses $ 60,000 million every year outside the country he rules.

Volkov says that circle closest to the president has lost a lot of money due to Western sanctions and is made up of leaders who “hate each other” and increase their differences, so the leadership is showing more and more cracks and could fall on Putin. .

Citing recent mutual accusations of loyalty to Putin between government spokesman Dmitry Peskov and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, the Russian opposition underscores that “some information has begun to leak against each other, a sign of the worsening situation in the elite.” , Two of his closest collaborators.

Ukraine, “Russian Falkland”

According to Volkov, the war in Ukraine is an example of the traditional practice of “a dictator wants to consolidate his power with rapid military victory,” but in many cases ends with a dictatorship that happened to the military junta.

Putin was “miscalculated in believing that Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine would welcome Russia’s so-called” liberators “with open arms,” ​​according to Navalny’s aide, “based on corruption intelligence reports.”

“When you spend millions of dollars on a campaign in Ukraine, it is easy for those responsible to have almost all the money and write good statements that promise Putin everything will work out,” he stressed.

As for Volga, the war has never been a means of pressuring Ukraine not to approach NATO, as Moscow has said, but an attempt by the Russian president to regain the good internal image he achieved by annexing Crimea in 2014. He reached his highest fame.

“Putin became addicted to celebrity ratings, and after the Crimea he was able to get 80% of them: that means people will love him no matter what he does, even if he posed half-naked on horseback,” he recalled.

“Before the war in Ukraine, that rate was 45%, the percentage that any democratic leader would dream of, but Putin was embarrassed and thought he should return to the numbers he had achieved in Crimea,” he said.

Intra-party conflict after Putin

According to Volkov, if that fall of Putin comes, according to Volkov, the analyst believes that a tense period will open, which will provide great opportunities for democracy to come because there is no clear successor and factional fighting in the first moments.

“It will be as if three years after Stalin’s death there was an intense civil struggle in which Nikita Khrushchev, Nikolai Bulganin and Zharkov Malenkov conspired against each other,” Volkov explained, turning to the history books and promising that now there was a difference. Russia Yes, there is a civil society, it will be mobilized.

Russia is now a thriving market economy, as it was in the 1990s.

Regarding the argument that Russia without such a strong leader could become the Balkans, Volkov insists, “Russia is big and small at the same time: in Kaliningrad and Vladivostok, separated by air for 11 hours, they speak the same language. There are no regional dialects, not even regional cuisines.”

Will Putin one day appear in court for war crimes? Volkov believes so, however he jokingly points out, “I would actually end up in a comfortable room, well fed, and surrounded by translators and translators.”

“My real dream is that one day he will be taken to Mariupol to dig up the graves of the people he killed and dig graves so that these people can have a proper resting place,” Volkov concluded.