Pod Save the World - Inside Navalny’s operation

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

Ben lays out the significance of the elections and governmental shakeups in Israel, Colombia, and France and talks through the latest on the war in Ukraine. Then Ben talks with Alexei Navalny’s chief of staff Leonid Volkov in Copenhagen about Navalny’s fate, his media operation, and Putin’s propaganda machine. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

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Welcome back to POTC at the World. I'm Ben Rhodes. And Tommy is on vacation this week. So it's just me. But on this episode, I'm just going to go through some of the big developments of taking place around the world last few days, a lot in politics, in Israeli politics with the collapse of the government there, in the French elections and the French elections,

and the Colombian elections, the latest out of Ukraine. And then you will hear my interview, which I taped during my recent trip to Europe, with Lained Volkov. And this is a pretty well-timed interview. Lainid Volkov is Alexei Navalny's chief of staff and has been for a bunch of years. And now essentially helps run the Navalny political media operation, which is largely in exile based in Vilnius. What you'll hear is how the opposition, the Russian opposition, the Navalny operation has managed to prepare for Navalny's imprisonment, how they've been taking direction from Navalny within prison and communicate with them, although, as you'll hear in a bit, that's rapidly changing as we

speak, how they've basically built a media operation. They've always had a heavy media component, but what they're really focused on is getting news into Russia about the war, real news, which is hard to come by for Russians. And they've had some success here. They're reaching tens of millions of people largely through their YouTube channel. You'll hear about some of the impediments that they face in doing that as Google and YouTube have imposed restrictions on what can be done. Unfortunately, some of those restrictions have caught up the Navalny operation. So you hear a bit about that, a bit about how they look at the future of Russia, the vulnerability of Putin, what Russian political opinion might actually be, a bit of skepticism

from Volkov about these polls that constantly show sky high support for Putin and sky support for the war in Ukraine. That always kind of made sense to me if I was a Russian and somebody called me up and pulled me and said, you know, what do you think about Putin? I might feel a little uncomfortable saying I didn't support him. But this is a great window into election of only into the Russian opposition, an alternative Russian view on the war, then we hear from the bombastic statements that come our way. So you'll definitely want to hear this interview. I was pretty fascinated by it to sit down and talk to this guy and hear firsthand what they're trying to do. And it's essential. I mean, we talk about the war in Ukraine and we obviously talk

about the support for the Ukrainians. Ultimately, Russia is a country with 140 million people and a bunch of nuclear weapons. It's not going anywhere. And so the only way that we get to a better place. Ultimately, in addition to obviously supporting Ukraine in the immediate term, is for there to be some change in Russia in the longer term. And here you hear a voice that at least is fighting for, working for that change. Just a few more things before we get started here. Crooked coffee is officially here. As you've heard Tommy talk about, it's delicious. So I have to say, the first blend, what a morning, is available in both medium and dark. roast. I'm a dark roast guy, but you can pick up the medium as well. They're both delicious.

It's a specialty grade, ethically sourced, small batch roasted to perfection. Plus, Crooked is donating a portion of the proceeds to register her to help millions of women across the country vote. So go to crooked.com slash coffee to get your crooked coffee now. We also have exciting news about mother country radicals. This is the new crooked podcast. In this 10 episode series, host Zahad Ayers Dorn takes us back to the 70s when his parents and their young friends in the weather underground declared war on the United States government. I've listened to the beginning of this. This is an awesome podcast. You're not going to want to miss it. Amazing characters and amazing history. Even if you know the history, you don't know the details as told by someone, you know, literally

born on the inside. It looks at this kind of monumental time in our history. It uses archival footage, first-hand interviews from nearly every living member of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army. So please check it out. Listen to the first three episodes of Mother Country Radicals right now, wherever you get your podcast. A couple more things, of course, I'll put in my own plug. Please pick up the paperback of after the fall. If you haven't read it already, haven't read it in a different form, you can also get the audiobook, which I narrate. It obviously covers all the stuff we've been talking about on the show, including the time I spent talking to Alexanaevalny. before he was in prison, he's a key character in the book. So another reason to pick up after the fall if you haven't. Also, yesterday was World Refugee Day. It's something to step back and think about 100 million people around the world who've been forcibly displaced. That's a record for refugees. We haven't seen anything like this since after World War II. So please figure out how you can support refugees or all manner of organizations you can support. One thing I want to plug, if folks are just interested,

There are 100 million refugees in that number that's so big. Sometimes we lose the individual stories of people who are refugees. There's an incredible new project called sadaproject.org. That's sadproject.org. What they do on this website is they tell the individual very specific, very wrenching, and very human stories of six refugees. So if you want to put a human face on that very big number, go to sadda project.org. So we're just going to start with some political news from. three very different countries where we've had three very dramatic developments over the course of the last several days, each of which I think speaks to trends we've talked about on POTS of the World a lot. The first is in Israel where we will have our fifth election in three years coming up, the Israeli Prime Minister Neftali Bennett, after weeks of some political dysfunction in the country as the very tenuous coalition that has governed Israel has been collapsing before our eyes, the Prime Minister Neftali Bennett announces that there will be another election later this year. And as a part of this move towards a new election, he announced that his

coalition partner, Yarra-Lapid, is going to take over as prime minister on interim basis until that election. Now, what does this mean? This means that we could be looking at the potential return of Prime Minister Bibi Nanjahu, the former Prime Minister, as the leader of a very right-wing, very nationalist coalition. We could have the emergence of Lapid, who's the more moderate member of this coalition, as someone who's not been able to quite get over the hump, take his crack at it, or you could have Natali Bennett, also a right-wing nationalist, although one who's broken from Netanyahu, he will make his run for it, too, most likely. So this is a once again a very uncertain moment in Israeli politics where the kind of deadlock that has

been the norm in Israeli politics for the last few years will once again be handed over to Israeli voters to see which way they want to go. Interesting timing in a couple of ways. One is because Joe Biden is scheduled to go to Israel in a few weeks as a part of the trip that will also take him to see non-friend of the pod, Muhammad bin Salman, in the Saudi Arabia. So anytime an American president visits Israel, it's obviously a big deal. Visiting Israel in this kind of strange political circumstance, I think, makes the visit even more complicated. There have been reports that the U.S. government has asked Israelis to not undertake particularly provocative actions, whether it relates to settlements, whether it relates

to the Palestinians. But when you're in a time of political dysfunction in Israel without a very strong government, you never quite know what's going to happen on the ground. And so I think the context for that visit gets that much more complicated as we look for a resolution, hopefully, through the next election to this Israeli political crisis. It does not lead to the return of Netanyahu, but that unfortunately cannot be ruled out. And so like many other countries, Israel's political circumstances remain very fragile and very much in question. Now, getting to places that have had elections in the last few days. The first was in France, where we've talked a lot about the parliamentary elections that we're going to follow the presidential election. Now, just to

rewind the tape here, Emmanuel Macron, the pretty much centrist president of France, was reelected pretty comfortably over Marine Le Pen, the far right leader. However, these elections did not go the way that Macron wanted them to go. He did not win the kind of absolute outright majority that he had in his first term and that he would need to govern kind of with ease. He will be able to get a majority cobbled together with some other centrist parties, but he faces a much bigger left wing block that performed pretty well in the election. But he also faces a much bigger far right block than we've ever seen before. Marine Le Pen and her party did better in this parliamentary election than they've ever done before. And so you're going to have something of a polarized legislature in France.

You're going to have a president and Emmanuel Macron who's going to have to cut deals to get his domestic agenda through and to sustain support for his foreign policy. And I think importantly, something to watch here, Macron is term limited, so he has a five-year term. But these bigger questions about the future French politics remain unresolved because you have a disturbingly large block of far-right voters and parliamentarians that will clearly be trying to gear up for that next election. You'll have a left that came together in a big tent coalition for the purposes of standing in this election and we'll have to see whether that leads into some kind of rejuvenated French left that can reclaim the presidency. And you have Macron's kind of centrist political movement, which is

very much tied just to the person of Emmanuel Macron, and you have the question of whether that can lead into some kind of more durable political party that is able to carry forward after Macron. So like a lot of democracies, France remains a place with, albeit a strong president of Macron, but a very uncertain political future as well. And then the other election that we've been watching carefully was in Colombia. And in Colombia, you had a very driven. dramatic development with the victory of Gustavo Petro, Colombia's first left-wing president in its history. I think this is really notable in a number of ways. The first is we've talked about several times. This continues a very substantial trend of left-wing leaders getting elected

in Latin American democracies. We've seen it in Mexico. We've seen in Peru. We've seen in Argentina. We've seen it in Chile. Now we see it in Colombia. which has usually been the kind of strongest right of center country in the region. This is also a country in Columbia that has a very longstanding relationship of the United States received billions of dollars over the last decade or more from the United States to fight drug cartels, to try to eradicate drugs, to continue the fight against the FARC, which was a left-wing guerrilla movement that turned into a political movement that reached a settlement with the government in the Obama year.

So the question here going forward is, what is it going to mean for Latin America and for the United States to have this leftist government, not just in Colombia, but these leftist governments across the region? I think, you know, in a lot of ways, there's something hopeful about this. You have electorates that are really frustrated with inequality, which has been terrible in Latin America, with political elites that are not responsive to the concerns of ordinary people. You have steps that need to be taken against climate change in Latin America. So you have a left-wing agenda that I think could deliver a lot of results for people. If real steps are taken, meaningful steps to combat inequality, if real steps are taken to make Latin America a key partner in the global effort against climate change. But you also have the challenge of meeting expectations.

Can these leaders who are getting elected in places like Chile and Colombia really deluge? liver on what they've run on, especially when they're faced with pretty endemic inequality and pretty sclerotic political elites that are pretty out of touch with the people who are turning away from traditional political parties. So this will be fascinating to watch, and it will be fascinating to watch what it means for this U.S. Colombian relationship to have a left-wing leader like Petro in power in Colombia. I think it's also a sign of just how out of touch America's Latin America policy can be from what the people in Latin America are actually looking for, from their own leaders and from partnership with the United States. I think this is on display

in Florida, which is kind of the center of right-wing American politics as it relates to Latin America, where Ron DeSantis gave some kind of rant yesterday about Marxist, communist, blah, blah, bad guys taking over in Colombia. You know, Ron DeSantis, I don't think has his finger on the pulse of what the Colombian people are looking for. He has his finger on the pulse of right-wing politics in Florida. Unfortunately, right-wing politics in Florida has been quite influential in making America's Latin American policy over much of the last couple decades. So this is something else to watch, whether Colombia drifts away from its relationship with the United States or whether the United States in the Biden administration can have a more rational Latin America policy

that is less rooted in these ideological debates of the past and more focused on, hey, what can we do together to fight inequality, to fight climate change, to support democracy, to combat corruption. So all of this bears watching, but pretty dramatic political developments in three really important in different countries, Israel, France, and Colombia. And each of them really speaks to kind of what we've been talking about a lot on this podcast, which is the future of democracy itself. the collapse of a lot of the traditional political parties that have held power for much of the last several decades.

And this question of whether the populist moment that we're living through, whether that manifests itself going forward on the left or on the right. So a lot to keep track of going forward. Now, in Ukraine, several updates on Ukraine before we get to our interview with Alexei Navalny's chief of staff. The fighting on the ground in the Dombos region of eastern Ukraine continues to be a grind. And you've seen Russia continue to make kind of incremental gains around some of the more strategically important cities in the region. Tough fighting on the ground. But some of these towns that have been contested are falling more and more under the hands of the Russians as we talked about in a couple of the previous shows. I think what you see from the Ukrainians is a continued demand.

really for more longer range artillery and heavier weapons. It can allow them to beat back Russian advances in a way that they just haven't been able to date. I think there are also a bunch of interesting developments as it relates to both Russia's relationships with other countries and America's relationship such as it is with Russia. First, kind of an interesting story, you had Russia issuing threats to Lithuania the other day. Now, Lithuania is a Baltic member of NATO. So Lithuania does have that security guarantee. A Russian attack on Lithuania is an attack on NATO that would bring the United States into the conflict. Now, why is this happening? Why is Russia threatening reprisal attacks against Lithuania? It's because there's a Russian enclave called

Kaliningrad that does not attach to Russia territorially, right? It's on the other side of Lithuania. It's nestled between Lithuania and Poland. It's this kind of bizarre Soviet-era relic where you you had a city, Kaliningrad, that was somewhat repopulated by Russians in the post-World War II Stalin years. And Russia hung on to Kaliningrad on the back end of the Cold War. Now, what's happened is that in order to get supplies, like basic stuff, like concrete, the kinds of things that an enclave needs to survive and maintain its economy, a lot of that stuff flows through Ukraine on rail. And because of European Union sanctions, Lithuania is now saying they will not allow Russia to issue a lot of these shipments through Lithuanian territory. So the Russians have a problem.

They can't get supplies to this enclave, this city, Klinengrad that's on the other side of Lithuania without going through Lithuanian railways. The Lithuans are saying, you can't do that because of sanctions. And now you have Russia issuing threats to Lithuania that there's going to be some kind of response. The Lithuanians have pretty much taken this in stride. They've said that this is just more hyperbole from Russia. This is just bombast. They're not too worried about it. And they said, pointedly, they're not worried about it because they are a member of NATO.

But it does bear watching because one of the things you always want to look for in this war is any potential tripwire that could escalate the conflict directly between NATO and Russia. This is one of those places where it could happen. Although I tend to agree with the Lithuanians, we've seen the Russians. threaten nuclear war over all kinds of things, including Finland and Sweden wanting to join NATO. This could just be more empty threats, empty bluster, or we could see other kinds of Russian attacks on Lithuania. Cyber attacks, for instance, is something that they've used in the past against the Baltics. So something that bears watching. Today, in a surprise visit in Ukraine, the U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has visited to offer support to some of the nascent efforts to

hold Russia accountable for war crimes. The U.S. Justice Department obviously has a lot of expertise that can be brought to bear in these investigations to gather evidence, to build cases. So all in all, I think, a useful visit and a sign that U.S. Ukrainian cooperation extends far beyond just the military realm and the shipping of weapons. This is one other front in the area of cooperation and one where I hope the United States can bring a lot of that expertise and a lot of those resources to bear and building what are very necessary efforts to hold Russia accountable for war crimes. At the same time, we've seen increasing reports about Americans who've been fighting in Ukraine. Now, Ukraine has a foreign legion that they've set up,

and reportedly there are thousands of people who are not Ukrainian who are now fighting as a part of the Ukrainian military. And the U.S. State Department on Tuesday confirmed the death of an American citizen in Ukraine and his obituary said that he died fighting in the war in May. His name is Steven Sebelski. And we don't know that much more about him. But we do know that it's the first confirmed death by the U.S. government of American fighting in Ukraine. This guy was 52 years old and presumably was fighting as a part of that effort of foreigners going to Ukraine. We also have two Americans who had been captured and who were in Russian custody and don't seem to be offered the same kinds of protections that combatants would normally be offered in a war.

The Kremlin's spokesman went out earlier this week and said that the two Americans who've been captured there will be, quote, held responsible for the crimes they have committed. And this suggests that the Kremlin might try to prosecute them as terrorist or as war criminals. and that would deliver them a much, much harsher sentence than if they're just being held essentially as prisoners of war. And we saw this happen earlier this month when a couple of Britons and a Moroccan who had been fighting with the Ukrainian Armed Services were actually sentenced to death in Russian-occupied territories. It remains to be seen what happens to these foreigners. But again, I think something to watch here is you have a lot of foreigners going to Ukraine to fight. They obviously bring expertise and experience if they've been serving in the American military

and the British military. The Ukrainian see this is both a sign of international support but also pretty practical support in that they're getting experienced soldiers on the ground. However, it's going to set up potentially more and more of these types of circumstances where you could have American casualties, British casualties, other national casualties inside of Ukraine, or you could have more of these kind of standoff trials where the Russians use the threat of really harsh sentences, life sentences, death sentences, to try to leverage or pressure or increase the cost for nations like the United States that are providing support for

Ukraine. So this is something we have to watch. And I think the baseline point is that people who are fighting in this war should be treated as combatants. And that means that they should have all the protections of the Geneva Conventions, the kinds of protections that suggest that you hold prisoners of war, you hold them in appropriate conditions, you certainly don't sentence them in sham trials in the way that the Russians are doing. So once again, the Russians are kind of throwing out the playbook, and that's going to increase the danger to these individuals and obviously the despair potentially for their families, but also could become another, yet another, source of geopolitical tension. One other area that bears watching, there are definitely signs that that Russian oil

that has gone off the European market and the American market because the U.S. has an oil embargo on Russia and Europe is weaning itself off Russian oil. There are definitely signs that China and India are making up some of the losses that Russia has suffered from sanctions. China's imports of Russian oil rose 28 percent in May from the U.S. previous month. That's a record high, and that means that Russia has actually overtaken Saudi Arabia as the largest supplier of oil to China. And this is one of the scenarios that we were watching when sanctions were announced. Was China going to essentially sit this out by the same amount of Russian oil that they always did? Or might they try to step in? And one way they could help Russia

out certainly economically and in financing their war machine is by buying more oil, maybe buying it at a discount rate, initial signs are that China is doing that and that some of these other Asian countries like India that rely somewhat on Russian oil are similarly ticking up their purchases of Russian energy. So this is something that raises questions to the United States. One question is will we not just apply diplomatic pressure on countries like China, but will we start to sanction people that we believe are seeking to skirt the sanctions that have been put in place on Russia. This is going to be a big challenge going forward. And one of the things that we've talked about to tie all this together is that as the fighting becomes this grind in eastern Ukraine,

as it stretches out week after week, month after month, as inflation continues to be a huge political challenge inside of the United States and inside of Europe, will the sanctions regime start to break down. Will the Russians start to find workarounds? Will they start to exploit some of those political vulnerabilities around inflation in the West? A lot of those scenarios seem to be taking shape here. And so even though Ukrainians have been able to fight off the worst of the Russian invasion around Kiev, they've not necessarily been able to push back the Russian offensive in the East, they certainly haven't been able to go on offense and take back significant amounts of territory from Russia. And there's now these other fronts in the war. There's a global

food crisis. There's the polls potentially in the sanctions regime. And there's the political vulnerabilities in maintaining that sanctions regime because of inflation. So I think thus far, the Biden administration has been quite firm and demonstrated a lot of resolve, not just in imposing sanctions, but in holding NATO together and holding this sanctions regime together. As we entered this new phase, that's going to get more difficult. And it's probably going to require a sustained argument. And you don't hear much about Ukraine and the news, certainly to the same extent that you did a few months ago. In that environment, it's going to be more important, not less important, for not just people like President Zelensky of Ukraine, but for President Biden and other leaders

of democracies to be out there, reminding their publics what this fight is worth, why it's important to be plugging those holes in the sanctions regime and to be doing everything we can, obviously to at the same time hold open a doorway to potential negotiation to put an end of the fighting, but so long as the Russian assault is ongoing, to get Ukraine the support it needs and to keep the pressure on Russia. So now, after the break, we'll hear my interview with Lena Volkov, who is Alexei Navalny's pretty long-time chief of staff. An interesting, note, I taped this interview with Leonid in Copenhagen about a week ago. Since then, there's been some news about Navalny. He kind of went off the grid after we got accustomed to hearing from him

largely through social media. And you hear in the interview from Leonid how Navalny was able to tweet and post Instagram messages and essentially offer direction to his political organization from prison. While that circumstance is no longer available to them. And you hear Leonid, by the way, in the interview, talk about how they expect that. And they anticipated that Navalny was going to be moved to a much more isolated and severe penal colony in Russia. That has happened since this interview. And so Navalny kind of went off the grid for a couple of days. Then it became known that he was moved to this more severe penal colony.

You heard from people in the Navalny operation expressed their concerns here. we heard from Navalny's family saying, quote, this is one of the most dangerous and famous high security prisons in Russia, known for torturing and murdering the inmates. It is, of course, very concerning because he is one-on-one with the same people and the same government that tried to kill him in 2020. So this is a pretty dire warning from Navalny's family and his associates that they're concerned for his well-being, his safety and his life as he's been moved to this more, I guess in the U.S. parlance would be more. more maximum security prisons, but in Russia, it's a bit even more severe here. And at a minimum, one of the outcomes of this transfers that he's not going to be able to have the same degree of communication with his lawyers, with his political operation, and with the outside world that he's had to date. So yet another sign of Putin slamming the door on any voices of opposition from within Russia. Yet another challenge to Alexei Navalny, who's shown great courage. What you'll hear from Laynid, though, is that there is still a pretty substantial organization that

Navalny's built that is active, that is based in Vilnius in Lithuania, another reason why Lithuania might be in Russia's crosshairs, and that is trying to carry on the work that Navalny set in motion, even if we may not be able to hear from Navalny in the same way that we have to date. So stick around for the interview. It's really, really fascinating. I'm very pleased to be joined by Leonid Volkov, who is the chief of staff for Alexana Valny's political operation. And we're here in Copenhagen. Thanks so much for doing this. Thank you for the invitation. So let me just start by asking you what is the condition of Alexana Volney right now and how much are you able to be in contact with him? Well, he's imprisoned, which is a bad thing.

But otherwise, he's strong. I mean, he's mentally, morally, like absolutely fit. We are able to maintain contact to him through his attorneys, who are allowed to visit him, like, on a regular basis. So they literally like print out the internet for him. So he is in touch with the reality, with the political reality, and he works a lot. So he's not only a symbol of the protest and resistance in Russia, but he also the acting head of our organization. So he's not retired. He's not like just spending times there, but he's working and taking all the like, strategic level decisions that define the operations of our political organization of the Russian opposition. And how is his health? I mean, obviously he had been poisoned.

Well, I mean, the absence of bad news is our good news in this regard. So you don't want to get sick in Russian prison. It's a place where there's just no health care in place. When he got sick, like last April, it was a huge crisis. So, like, really, you know, He had to go on a hunger strike to get medical treatment. Since the time, there was no other crisis, but if something happens, it will be a problem. And he's, I think, scheduled to be moved to a more maximum security prison. He's been sentenced to an additional 15 years, is it? What are you anticipating there?

To additional eight years. But, yeah. Eight years addition. Yeah. And then there are new charges, which might add another 15 years. Okay. First of all, no one cares. He doesn't care.

We don't care about these charges and about this prison terms. Because everyone knows his sentence was always meant to be life sentence. But the question is, who's life? His or Putin's. Yeah. Whatever expires first. And of course, while Putin is in Kremlin, he will not allow Alexei to be released. And when Putin is gone, then Alexei will be released, we believe, quite immediately.

Now on the prison, that's a funny thing about Russian law enforcement, you know. It's according to the law, he had to be moved to maximum security prison a few weeks ago when his last sentence became effective. But it's Russian legal system. Yeah. For some reasons, they don't do it. Maybe they didn't yet install all the cameras in the toilet and the new facility or something like that.

Yeah, they're preparing the new facility. Yeah. So they keep him and his... current facility, completely illegally, but no one cares. Yeah. Well, and how is your, well, actually, it's one more question about this, because I was really struck when I talked to him for my book. He was totally lacking in fear.

I mean, well, he said you are afraid when you're in prison, but the certainty that he had about what he was willing to do and sacrifice, I mean, you've never. known him for a while. I think people look at this and just can't imagine that he would return to Russia from Germany after being poisoned and nearly killed. I mean, how do you, he's a colleague of yours, presumably a friend. What do you want people to know about why he does this and how he does it? We've worked together since like 11 years and we have close friends. But it is a question of perspective actually. Like every time I'm doing an interview, journalists would ask me, like, why did he return? And I will say, I mean,

why do you ask this question? Like, how did he decide to return? There was never a decision point. There was never a situation when we were like, I don't know, sitting at a round table and discussing like pros and contrast. Even since he was in a coma, we knew he will return like quite immediately because he belongs there, because he is Russian political leader, because he didn't do anything wrong. He's like a free man. And because of all the sacrifices, he's already taken. That's actually the point.

And his family supports him. Yeah, he took enormous risks during like previous 12 years, like three trials in any court, multiple arrests, like hundreds of days in detention. Like a chemical acid attack against him in 2017 when he narrow, when he, narrowly lost sight on his right eye, and then, like, and the assassination attempt, everything. Just to, like, stay abroad to become, like, a political exile, would be, would kind of make all

the sacrifice of the past kind of, like, almost obsolete. And it was, like, clear for him and for everyone around him. So we never had this discussion on whether he had to return. Of course, he had to, and he has full support of his family and of the team. And of course, we discussed a lot, like how the roles will be distributed, how we should work when he's imprisoned, like how the organization will operate and so. And I believe, I'm pretty sure he is, well, satisfied with how everything works. He's in prison. But he's clearly, clearly the leader of virtual opposition.

the perception of Russian politics is very clearly like black and white for everyone who observes it. It's like Putin versus Navalny. And the organization is intact. Like despite all the pressure against us, we were able to save it. It operates. And it operates on even larger scales than ever. Yeah. Well, so I want to ask you about that.

So obviously the accommodation of him being prison, but also obviously the war in Ukraine, must have transformed your operations. We can get into the individual pieces of what you're doing, but how would you describe what the operation is doing now, where your focus is? Yeah, indeed. Like, flexibility has always been the key to our survival in this very toxic environment.

So our political organization did very different things during the last 10 years. We've been an electoral campaign when we were running for mayor of Moscow or for president of Russia. Yeah. We've been a labor union when we organized like teachers

and doctors to unionize when we helped them. We've been a political party when we try to support our candidates in local regional elections. We've been, of course, a body of investigative journalism

doing like anti-corruption investigation. And these are always the same people. So we are very like universal and flexible. So now February 24th, we became the largest media operation in Russia. The largest Russian-speaking publishing house, so to say. Fun thing, Putin gave us a head start, actually.

So he forced us to move out of the country like last summer. Like in April, they moved to announce as an extremist organization. In June, we have been awarded this designation of an extremist organization. So after this, no one of our employees could stay visiting. in Russia. Otherwise, they would face up to 10 years of imprisonment. So we relocated all our staff to Vilnius and elsewhere.

And also, many journalists ask me, do you regret? And my answer was always, I don't have time to regret because we don't want to concentrate on the opportunities lost. We want to think about new opportunities. This yields us. And with our flexibility, we will

be able to make use of this opportunities. Like, when we were back in Moscow, We could never afford to run a wide-scale media operation because every third month, someone would come with a search warrant and would just seize all the equipment pretending this to be like material evidence for yet another criminal case. This happened to us like five or six times. Five or six times like law enforcement raided our office in Moscow

and took everything, like cameras, light equipment, laptops, phones, whatever thing, whatever. So we always operated with a very small basic set of equipment. In Vilna, we don't have these constraints, so we announced that last summer we will build a huge media operation. And our plan was to launch a huge political entertainment YouTube channel on March 1st, 2022, like to reach out to new audiences through entertainment. Like literally, to do like a cooking show,

but to discuss the enormously growing, like, food supplies prices during the cooking show. Something like this. Like, to connect to new audiences, to engage more Russian people into, like, political debate. Yeah. So, we had to launch at March 1st. Now, Putin invites Ukraine. The war starts February 24th. But we already have.

We have our studio. We have our equipment. We have ever seen. Okay. We start to do, like, anti-war political television, like from the very first day of the war. We started on February 24th, and we continued through this three and a half months with political news, news about the war, expert interviews, analysis, counter-propaganda,

like anti-fake and all kind of like dismantling criminal's propaganda. And so on, so, like we started with two hours of broadcasting a day. Now we're up to like six hours of broadcasting a day, and I believe we've been. will get to like 24 hours by the end of this year. It's like a real, like political, independent political channel, which is the largest Russian independent media. We have a monthly reach of almost 20 million unique viewers, which is a huge operation.

We need the same people who did like anti-corruption investigations, and the same people who did like local electoral campaigns now are doing in media. We hired a few professional journalists too, But still, it's all such a makeshift operation. But we believe it's very important because Putin not only started the war here, also silences all the independent voices inside the country. But while we are broadcasting on YouTube, we are able to push our message through, we believe it's very important because it's very important

to change the attitude of Russian society to this war. And is that 20 million? How much of that do you think is within Russia? Almost all of them. Almost all of it, yeah. And so what is your sense? I mean, there's some, you know, we see in the West this insane set of conspiracy theories and disinformation on Russian state television and online.

We hear reports of, you know, 70, 80 percent of Russians support this war, or you hear anecdotes of people in Ukraine calling their family in Russia and the people telling them, oh, we're there to fight the Nazis. these or what's your sense of Russian opinion? Because clearly, you know, not everybody agrees with the Putin line. You know, not everybody necessarily agrees with your line either. How do you have any grip on how Russians are thinking? Well, Russian public opinion is, of course, something that it's now very challenging to measure.

So people just don't talk to the pollsters. So we have our in-house polling department within the Anti-Corruption Foundation since the Moscow mayoral election in 2013, we are always running the polls of our own because it's really important for our political operation to be aware of what's actually going on. And one fact that I can disclose

that the response rate for the telephone interviews for the surveys that we were routinely conducting was about 20% before the war and it dropped to below 7% after the inception of the war. So people just don't talk to the polls. That fear?

Yeah, that's fear. they feel fear, they feel stress, they don't want to confront the reality, they don't want to tell the truth and so on. I dismiss those claims that like 85% of Russians support the war. We don't see any public support. They tried, for instance, to introduce this like letter Z

as a symbol of the support of the war. It appears only on police cars and governmental institutions. People do. don't put it themselves on their cars or phone covers or whatever. So it didn't take off. People don't like this symbolic. And also, if he considered, like, for opinion leaders, like, despite all the repression and the risks,

like much more like singers, artists, scientists, raised their voice against the war rather than supported the war. And also, if we ask questions, like indirectly, if we run our polling in a more sophisticated way, then we are able to get closer to the truth. The last poll we did, we asked a question, imagine, like, oil prices are up, they are. And there is additional income in Russian budget.

So how would you spend it? Like, now, we don't ask them to spend their money. Like, in Ukraine, there is a, a 1.5% income tax for the support of the army since 2014. For eight years, Ukraine are paying additional 1.5%

of their income for their army. Actually, this is the outcome. Ukraine and army of 2020 is so much different of Ukraine and army of 2014. So if you would ask Russian people if they want to spend like 1.5% of their income, everyone would say no. But we ask this question,

there is additional income in the budget. How would you like to spend it? We have Russian citizens who are aware of the war and propaganda is telling them every day. We are not only fighting those Ukrainian Nazis. We are fighting the NATO. We have enormous enemies. This is a third world war. The Russian culture is under pressure.

They are going to destroy everything dear to every Russians. Those like those NATO-American-led gays and lesbians are going to. going to destroy our unique Russian civilization. So this is what propaganda is telling them 24 by 7. So what's your guess? How many of Russian compatriots wanted to increase military spending? Under the circumstances. I guess like 40%?

6.8. 6.8? Less than 7%. Yeah. And it says a lot. Yeah. It says a lot. Yeah.

So it's, so you can't ask the question. do support the war or not. Because the person who's being asked knows perfectly that the wrong platform must yield 15 years in prison. But if you really try to ask the question in a different way, the outcome is not that positive for Putin. There is a core of hardline Putin supporters. There are people who think Putin is not doing enough.

So we have to just drop a nuclear bomb on Kiev, like, they are less than 10% by all measurements. The majority of people, the vast majority, unfortunately, are representing this political swamp. People who don't follow politics, who don't follow the news, they are shocked by what is happening. They feel fear, and they kind of like use the cliches suggested by propaganda as their self-protection. Yeah. A regular person can't say to themselves, that's my fault. That's my guilt.

This happened because I didn't ever participate in an election, because I didn't ever follow politics, because I decided not to participate in political life. So I have my income, my vacations in Turkey and my mortgage zone, let Putin handle everything. Now, this is my fault that Russia has become. like a full-scale fascist state. A regular person can't say it to themselves. It requires quite a level of reflection. So not to get insane, like to protect their integrity.

They borrow this propaganda cliches. We had to do it otherwise they would attack first. We have to do it like to protect our culture from those Nazis and so on. But these cliches, this is not a bulletproof vest. This is like a crunch and creme brule. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just a very basic protection, just not to think too much about what's actually happening. If we talk to them, if we just try to knock through this crust, we are able to change their opinion.

So how do you make people in that environment, especially when Putin's dominated so much of Russian politics for 20 years, how do you make them believe that things can change, you know? Well, first of all, even the most hardline Putin's supporters have to admit he's probably not eternal. Yeah, it will end at some point. Well, probably some of them believe he is not. He invests enormously in longevity. As you know, his elder daughter, she's an endocrinologist. And he has spent like billions on her institute where she effectively tries to develop a longevity pill. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But hopefully she will not be successful. And Putinism is a very personal story. It's a real autocracy. Yeah. It's a real autocracy. It can't be inherited. Yeah. Putin doesn't have a successor.

It's not a system. It's not like even the Soviet Union where you had a party infrastructure. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's just Putin himself and his lieutenants, each of them, like, hating each other. Even like when Stalin died. Yeah. It took them three years to come.

up with the new leader. Like first, Hroshov, Malenkov and Molotov killed Darya, then Hirschov and Mollotov get rid of Molotov and then Horshov managed to dispose of Malenkov. It's three years. Yeah. So pretty much the same going to happen when Putin is gone. Like he has like 15 or 20 like key lieutenants, none of them being strong enough to take over. And this is on purpose. Putin doesn't allow any of them to get strong because otherwise he's, you know, he's, you will be considered the lame duck the moment he appoints a successor so Putin has his own like support yeah legitimacy approval rating popularity but none of his lieutenants has and that's how the system works he they need him because only he has he can serve as a superior arbiter to resolve their

conflicts and so on because he has a mandate from the people he used to we have, mandate for other people. When he is gone, the names of majority of his, like, key people are not known to general public. And none of them has, like, any significant resource. So there will be an enormous, like, fight of each other against each other, which will present a perfect window of opportunities for us. Yeah. And we have invested, like, 10 years into building, like horizontal structures, grassroots movements, training activists and so on. We know we have millions of supporters

since then in the country, and we had an experience of like running protest rallies and 180 cities simultaneously. When there will be a window for opportunities, we will make the best possible use of it. Looking from the outside, I'm going to take a different category.

So we'll start with tech because you're in media and a lot of your platforms you mentioned involved with YouTube. A lot of the American tech companies, you know, have kind of been pulling out of Russia. There's this difficult balance for tech companies. One is there's this movement for everybody to leave Russia, right? We're going to get rid of McDonald's and everything. But then again, the only way that people can get actual information about the war in Russia

is if they can go on a tech platform like YouTube and see it. What do you think American tech companies can do to support people getting that information while not wanting to be a vehicle for Putin's propaganda? Well, first of all, they have to talk to us. They have to talk, like, not only to us, to all independent media, to civil society. They have to understand better. So their previous strategy of just following legal compliance

and Putin's legal compliance ahead of human rights has clearly failed. It is not a possible approach anymore. They have to think how to protect their users in countries like Russia or like China, and Turkey or Iran, they have to think about what's best for to protect like human rights, like freedom of speech and sin. Like indeed, we are very dependent on tech platforms. Yeah, we operate mainly on YouTube. So the majority of our audience is on YouTube. And unfortunately,

when the war started, like American tech giants did few mistakes in my opinion, like severe mistakes. Like, for instance, Google and Facebook switched off the opportunity, the option to run paid advertisement in Russia. They killed all monetization for Russian market. I believe they had a good intention, like not to let anyone earn money in Russia. But where did it lead us? Before the war, there were like four major platforms in Russia where you could do customer like two domestic ones like Yandex and VK and then Google with YouTube and AdSense and Facebook with Instagram. Yeah. And we did a lot of customer acquisition on Google and Facebook while the government did customer acquisition everywhere. So they did spread their lies and disinformation and propaganda on all four platforms. Yeah. So we were able to compete. We had two platforms. They had four. Now they are down to two, but we are down to zero. Yeah. The government is still. doing whatever they want with their disinformation on yandex and vk reaching pretty much every internet

user in russia we don't have a tool to do customer acquisition exactly at the point of time when it's necessary we talked about the political swamp yeah people who didn't follow the news but the war this is such a dramatic and life-changing experience that actually many of them for the first time wanted to watch something to read something to make their own opinion to understand what's going on this was the perfect moment of time where we could catch them where we could engage them start talking to them and we were not able to do it because we just can't run this annoying pre-roll on youtube anymore for whatever reason and so we are growing we are growing fast but it's entirely organic people finding you it's not you being able to promote and find exactly it's

It's only organic growth. It could be much faster. And of course, this growth for us and other independent media organizations on Russian language market, it's enormously important because it's one of the most suitable. It's one of the best possible tools to stop the war. Like, you know, the First World War, 1914, like Russia and Germany, mothers and sisters and wives, supporting their soldiers. You go, you fight for the God, for the Tsar, for the homeland. 1918, the same letters from home are, go back home. It's not your war. You don't belong there.

You don't want to. Yeah. Both on Russian and German sides. And they just stopped fighting effectively. Army is part of society. The morale of the army depends on morale of the society, depends on attitude dramatically. So working with the public mood in Russia, we can. could affect the ability of Russian military to perform any kind of operations. It's enormously important. And we were stripped of this opportunity by Google and Facebook in a clear case of collateral damage. Yeah. Well, hopefully that can evolve over time. And then what about, you know, sanctions policy has been a key way that the U.S. has tried to stop the capacity to to maintain the war. What is your assessment of U.S. and Western sanctions and is there more

you think that could be effective? Well, first of all, it's good. The final is there. We have been advocating for sanctions over assassination of Alexei Navalny over other crimes of Russian government for a long time. And well, if sanctions would have been adopted preemptively, Yeah. This actually could have prevented the war, I believe. You think so? Yeah, I think so. Because one of the reasons Putin decided to invade, yeah, he miscalculated in many regards.

He miscalculated of like attitude of Ukrainian people, strengths of Ukrainian army, but also of Western response. Because of the history of past eight years, he was sure there will be no response. And actually preemptive sanctions could have actually warned him. But, well, okay, the war has started. West has responded strongly, but this has to be continued. There is one very easy test. Are sanctions enough or not? Zvor has stopped? No, then sanctions were not enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll teach you how to do it. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's that is a good measure. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, our next idea is this huge sanction list of 6,000 people, like the second tier people,

that we identified in the Anti-Corruption Foundation. These are like upper-level management of Putin's system, like deputy ministers, deputy governors, key members of propaganda outlets, board members of state-owned companies, and so on, so-and-so. Like people who endorse the war, who made it possible, like real war enablers. The most important fact about them is their average,

age is 45. This is the next generation. Like Putin's inner circle, they are Putin's age and they have like nothing to lose, nowhere to run. Their hands are covered in blood. They know they were criminals and that. But to make the country run, to make the military run, to make the propaganda parade, they employ a huge layer of like next generation, hungry, agile managers. Those managers have to be reminded that they will have a life after Putin because they're one generation younger and now they can choose

if this will be a life of war criminals wanted everywhere in the world or of people who made a very correct choice in the very last moment. So we are targeting them, we're doing it publicly so not that we are talking, I don't know, like to European Commission behind closed doors.

But we've passed. We are promoting it in terms, in order to make people scared, to make these people jump ship. Because Putin's propaganda and military machine can't run without those people. And if many of them escape, if he managed to induce a domino effect, this will undermine Putin's ability to continue the war dramatically. Well, one last question. I mean, it can look like such a dark time. I mean, obviously, it's darkest of all for the people of Ukraine. But what sustains you?

You clearly have a lot of energy. Do you have a hope or is it just a kind of sense of obligation? Like, personally, what motivates you? Well, first of all, optimism is a job requirement. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you can't survive in rational position. It doesn't work the other way. But of course, well, there is a lot of support from family and friends.

there is a lot of integrity. We know we're doing the right thing. We are on the right side of the history. What we're doing is like morally, politically, historically, culturally, right. We know that Russia belongs to Europe. That Russia deserves to be a decent European country, that Russian people deserve better.

I live in Lithuania now. Which shares the same history, which has been part of the communist empire for over 40 years. The houses look at the... look the same. People look the same. The buses, the everything, like Vilnius looks pretty much the same as almost every Russian city of comparable size. Yeah. The same people and working a functioning democracy, competitive fair elections, free press, parliament and so on and so on. It works. I know it

works. Like for the same people, it's the most like Russophobic idea that it can't work in the world that it can't work in Russia. Of course it can. And also, the other thing is that Lithuanian doesn't have oil and gas, yet the average salary is just twice higher than almost two and a half times higher than in Russia. Like, because they don't have this enormous corruption burden, because they don't have Putin in his oligran, so on. Russians just deserve much better. And I clearly see how it's possible. And of course, the fact that we are also like one generation younger than Putin makes us sure that at the end of the day we will prevail. Yeah.

Well, look, I really appreciate this chance to talk to you. People should watch the extraordinary documentary Navalny, which we've talked about on this podcast before. How else can people kind of follow your work? Follow us on social media. Go to our website. We now finally do it also in English-language website. It's acf.intrational, so Anti-Corruption Foundation.

We have, by the way, our sanction list published there. We have a donate button there. Like we run on crowdfunding. And we see actually that some donations now arrive from our English-speaking audience. So we have a Russian-speaking version of our website and the English version of website. So we know how many people clicks a donate button on which version. We see that now after the documentary apparently, there is a lot of support from people who don't speak Russian but still want to support our work. that's okay. We publish our news and new initiatives, and of course you can subscribe to

mine or Alexis Navalny's social media where we also cover what's going on in the country. Thank you for this enormous opportunity to be on your podcast. Great, and it's great talking to. Positive the World is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chattuck. Kyle Seguin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Saul Rubin for production support and to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim. and Amelia Montuth, who upload our episodes as videos at YouTube.com slash procadmenia.

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