The Current - Russian dissident says Moscow's threats come from weakness

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

Russia is warning foreigners to leave Kyiv in order to avoid a coming assault. But Ukrainian MP Inna Sovsun and Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza say Ukraine and its allies should not be intimidated.

Have you ever wondered how clean the seats on the TTC are? I found, like, chicken bones or, like, bed bogs. Or why so many Toronto restaurant bathrooms are in dank basements? Sometimes it's the most sketchy things. Like, when you go down, it's like, what is this? I'm Hayden Waters, a reporter and producer on the podcast, This is Toronto. From breaking down Doug Ford's obsession with the island airport.

We have to bring Jets in. To being inside an iconic Toronto Strip Club in its final hours. We go beyond the headlines of the day and get to know Toronto and all its big, beautiful, frustrating, wardy, fascinating glory. So find and follow us, this is Toronto, wherever you get your podcast. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Russia is ramping up its attacks and threats against Ukraine. It's warning of intense strikes centered on Kiev and advising foreign citizens and diplomatic staff to leave the country.

In a moment, we'll hear from Russian dissident Vladimir Karamurza, who is visiting Ottawa and is here with me in studio. But first, Inesuvsan is a Ukrainian opposition MP. She is in Kiev. Hello. Good morning to you. You've heard about the threat from Moscow that these intense strikes are coming. What are you bracing for? Well, it's not surprising. It's not like we didn't see the strikes before. We unfortunately have been living under those strikes for four and a half years right now. The most recent one, which was two weeks ago, was of course rather intense. But again, it's a matter of degree, not so much of, you know, radical change. It's not like they threatened to do something they haven't done before, unfortunately, for four and a half

years. You know, Russian drones actually hit an apartment building in Romania overnight. What does that tell you, though, about how reckless Russia is willing to be? We have very few, you know, illusions about how reckless Russia can be. The biggest question right now is how Romania and other EU member states, but also Western countries in general, will react to that because that is a clear sign that Russia is a threat not just to Ukraine. It's a clear threat to other neighboring countries, but also to the global world order. So I think it's the matter of reaction that interests me much more and that I'm not sure about than the very fact that Russia did that, that this happened. We have been hearing from Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky,

that, you know, Ukraine needs more air defense systems. He's been writing to U.S. President Donald Trump, U.S. Congress, saying, quote, for a nation fighting for its survival, there is hardly anything more painful than to not have enough Patriot Air Defense missiles. So, I mean, where else can Ukraine go for support and how long can it sustain all of these kinds of attacks that are still coming its way? Well, I think there are two things to remember here. One is, of course, Ukraine should have increased capacity for air defense, for intercepting all the missiles flying into, you know, Ukrainian cities. And for that, of course, we need petrood systems. But also other things should be considered.

For instance, for quite some time, Ukraine now has been asking maybe the Western powers, particularly, you know, NATO member states, could use there, the Air Force that has been located in Poland to cover the west of Europe. Ukraine at least. And then we could move the rest of our air defense to other parts of the country so that we'll have a more dense air defense system for the whole territory. So that's one of the thing that can be done. It's just to cover the west of Ukraine from Poland. But another thing is we have to move in the direction of undermining Russia's capacity to attack to begin with. If they don't have the missiles to attack us with, then we will not need so many air defense in the country. So that is why we need a longer range missiles ourselves

so that we could destroy their warehouses, their production of missiles and so on and so forth. And then it will be much cheaper, both in terms of money, but also in terms of course human suffering, human cost, than trying to intercept what is already flying into our direction. So I think those two things should work in common because we would never be able to intercept everything that Russia is producing in this huge amount. We have to undermine the capacity to attack altogether.

That's critically important to keep in mind as well. And are you getting that support to undermine the capacity? Because it sounds as though Russia so far still has the capacity. Exactly. And that is a huge problem because unfortunately we've been asking for the longer range myself for many years now. And unfortunately, we are not getting them. And that's why we're seeing all those attacks, because they have the missiles to attack us with. So we have never asked for long-range missiles to attack Russian cities like they're doing to us.

But what we have to be able to protect ourselves and to destroy their defense sector. Ukraine just struck a deal with Sweden to buy grip and jets. I know those aren't missiles, but it's something in ways of going forward with this war, or at least defending yourself somehow. I mean, is looking beyond the U.S. for solutions the path forward now? Yes, we have to do this because obviously the U.S. has not proven to be the, you know, the strongest ally, the most reliable ally over the last couple of years. So it's good that we have another partners. They will not be able to cover everything that we're getting from the U.S. right now, of course, because a lot of technology is located in the U.S. as a Ukrainian member of parliament,

as a Ukrainian citizen, as a mother, I would hope that it would have come earlier, but probably about too late than never. You know, just last week as well, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Washington isn't interested in hosting, quote, an endless cycle of meetings that lead to nothing. And he was talking about the war in Ukraine. Do you need Washington to broker a deal? Is anyone able to broker a deal with Russia about this? Washington is definitely able to broker a deal.

It just for that it has to actually put pressure not on the victim but on the aggressor. And that is something that they were never ready to do over the last two years. And that is why those meetings were useless and never led to any result. Because what they were trying to do is to pressure Ukraine into accept and unacceptable and unfair conditions. So I still think that Washington could have brokered a deal. They could have provided stronger sanctions. they could have threatened with given Ukraine long-range missiles and many more weapons that we have been asking for. So I would rather say that if the U.S. is saying that those meetings didn't lead to any results,

they should question why it happened so. And the answer to that would be because they didn't put any pressure on Russia to actually stop this war. Is that in part because the U.S. has Iran. It's thinking about now, how do you sort of split that focus? Are you worried that their focus is not on Ukraine anymore? Frankly speaking, when the US focus under Trump administration has been on Ukraine, it didn't really bring us too much good. That's also truth.

So they have jokes here inside the country that maybe it's good that they're distracted to Iran right now. They're not helping Putin so much as they were and are not promoting his interests. Just before you go, last year you told us about how your partner had been fighting on the front lines from day one. You talked about your son rushing to shelters at school. This war is affecting everyone, including yourself, of course. How are you and your family doing all these years later? It's still the same. My partner is still in the front line for four and a half years now.

My son is so much getting used to running to the shelter that he cannot imagine his life without that. So it's unfortunately became such a normal thing for us here in Ukraine that is just scary. But I'm also sometimes I just... But when I keep thinking that this is the hell that I have, I personally as a person has, have been living in for four and a half years and there is no way to stop this, it just feels like years go by and my life is stuck in, you know, in this, in the middle of all of this. And I'm just living in all of this every single moment, cannot really enjoy my life, cannot plan, cannot, cannot do anything except for hope to survive.

hope that my family will survive. But that's not real the life, not really the life that I was hoping to lead. Okay. Inossovson, thank you so much for making time for us this morning. Thank you for having me. Inosovson is a Ukrainian opposition MP. She was in Kiev. Have you ever wondered how clean the seats on the TTC are? I found like chicken bones or like bedbugs. Or why so many Toronto restaurant bathrooms are in dank basements? Sometimes it's the most sketchy things. Like when you go to.

I was like, what is this? I'm Hayden Waters, a reporter and producer on the podcast. This is Toronto. From breaking down Doug Ford's obsession with the island airport, we have to bring jets in. To being inside an iconic Toronto strip club in its final hours. We go beyond the headlines of the day and get to know Toronto in all its big, beautiful, frustrating, warty, fascinating glory.

So find and follow us, this is Toronto, wherever you get your podcast. In Russia, it is illegal to, quote, discredit the army, a law that in practice has seen thousands of people arrested or fined for criticizing the Ukraine war and makes it hard to get a sense of how people are really feeling. Vladimir Karamurza is a Russian opposition politician and dissident who was imprisoned for speaking out against the war. He is in our Ottawa studio this morning. Vladimir, good morning to you. Good morning, Rebecca. Thank you so much for inviting me. Are Russians tiring of this war?

Well, I think it is increasingly evident that despite the propaganda, despite the censorship, despite the horrendous repression that you referenced there with today's Russia holding thousands of political prisoners and of course the fastest growing category in the list of Russian political prisoners are those of my fellow citizens who are speaking out against the war. And as you said, speaking out against this war leads to many years in prison, just making a social media post standing with a placard,

responding to an opinion poll question about the war in the wrong way, quote unquote, from the point of view of the government, can lead to prison sentences. And yet, despite the... this situation, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the Kremlin and for its political operatives to hide the growing war fatigue in Russian society. This war was, you know, not as overwhelmingly supported to begin with as the Kremlin propaganda liked to claim. You know, there's this big lie, sort of underpinning, you know, almost everything that Putin is doing,

but including this war of aggression that his regime has launched against Ukraine more than four years ago, the full-scale war of aggression, of course, let's not forget, actually this war has been going on for more than 12 years since 2014. But, you know, when I was in prison in Siberia, there was a small radio attached to the wall of my cell. It would be switched on by the guards at 5 o'clock in the morning with a wake-up call. I only switched off at 9 p.m. at night with the lights out. I had no control over it. So for the whole day, I was exposed to listening to this state propaganda. And one of the recurring themes of official Russian propaganda is this idea that there's this national consensus in Russia, that everybody, you know, supports Putin,

and everybody supports the war. And in the, you know, 18 months since I've been out of prison, I've been frankly shocked as to how many people in the West take this propaganda claim at face value and repeat it. This idea that supposedly this war is very popular among Russian citizens. Well, I've always believed that actions speak louder than words. And the fact that the Kremlin feels the need

to go into such repression, the fact that the Kremlin feels the need to keep Russian society in a state of constant fear, the fact that the Kremlin is so afraid, to allow even moderate anti-war voices on the ballot in elections, I think tells us much more than these fake official propaganda numbers could ever do. You were interested in a poll, I know, from the Independent Levada Center that asked Russians about the war.

Tell us a little bit about what it said that you found to be somewhat telling on this. Well, first of all, the necessary disclaimer. It's difficult to talk about polling in an authoritarian state when people know that there'll be personal consequences to giving the quote-unquote wrong answer. I gave this example in the article that, you know, in the autumn of 2024, war, a man in Moscow by the name of Yuri Kachavets received a five-year prison sentence for responding to an opinion poll question saying that he's against the war. This is a reality in Russia.

So with that huge disclaimer in mind that a lot of people are afraid to say what they actually think, it's nothing short of remarkable that this latest poll by the Lavada Center show that 62% of Russian citizens and almost two-thirds favor peace talks with Ukraine as opposed to 27%, only 27% who favor continuing this war. One can only imagine what? One can only imagine what, the real public feelings are if we take the fear factor out of the polling. But these are the numbers we see even now. Is it still dangerous for you today to speak to me about this in this way? I mean, do you feel targeted still by Russia here in Canada? Well, look, I try not to think about this. I've been involved in Russian opposition politics for almost 27 years. I came to work with

Boris Nemtsov, who was the most prominent leader of the Russian opposition, who was assassinated on Putin's orders in 2015. And I came to work with him back in 1999, the same time that Putin was coming to power, because to many of us, it was already apparent back. back then, how dangerous Putin was, and what direction it was going to take Russia and also the world with it. And when we have seen the consequences of that today. So, you know, I know what I'm doing is right and I'm going to continue doing it regardless of what the other side does.

You know, what's interesting is that Russia is losing more soldiers than it is able to recruit at this point. The head of Britain's spy agency says almost half a million Russian soldiers have been killed since the start of the war. Do people in Russia realize those numbers? Well, the propaganda is doing its best to try to hide this. And as you said at the beginning of this program, I mean, it's a criminal offense in Russia to speak out against the war in official criminal speech. That's discrediting the army.

If you talk about the actual losses, if you talk about it, it's not just speaking out against the war. It's just presenting honest facts about it. It's considered to be either discrediting the army or disseminating knowingly false information. That's another article criminal code. One of the ones I was tried under. And so the propaganda is doing its best, or it's worse, I should say, to try to hide the reality, hide the truth. But of course, it's impossible to hide it forever, especially when the figures are so horrendous. Just to put things in context, Rebecca, in the 10 years of the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan,

there are about 30,000 losses of the Soviet army, the Soviet Union being 15 different countries put together, not just Russia. Now, Russia alone is suffering losses of the magnitude you just outlined. And it's, you know, the Putin regime is not going to be able to sustain this for much further. And the day-to-day lives of Russians right now, what does that look like? How has it changed in the four and a half years that this war has been going on? Well, the same, literally the same week that Putin launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine back in February 22. The Russian government shut down what remained of independent media. In our country, it wasn't much to begin with, right?

Because Putin has been in power for such a long time. He's destroyed most independent media voices. But neither those few remaining by the spring of 2022 were shut down. We have pervasive internet blockages, you know, China style. And now this affects not only independent media outlets, This affects not only social media networks that people have got used to being a part of their daily lives. They're now increasingly affecting every aspect of life. Moscow used to pride itself as one of the most digitalized cities in Europe.

Now, nothing works. I mean, you can't order a pizza, you can't get a taxi. There's just a total internet blockage. Inflation is really high. Prices are rising rapidly. And, you know, so-called economic growth that the Russian government keeps reporting about, even according to their figures, it really slowed down. but even the ones that they're claiming, that's just the war machine.

There's not a real consumer economy. You know, these are drones and tanks and missiles. So even, you know, those people, there were millions of people in Russia who posed this war from the very beginning, hence the need for the Kremlin to engage in such repression and to engage in these fear tactics. But even those people who sort of tried to stay out of politics, quote-unquote, tried to look the other way, let me be blunt about it,

even those people who try to look the other way, it's beginning to affect them now as well, because this war is coming to everybody's daily lives. And it is becoming increasingly unpopular. There's an increasingly evident war fatigue in Russian society. And it's becoming more and more difficult for the Kremlin to hide it, especially that we are now four months away from so-called parliamentary elections in September. I say so-called because Russia hasn't had real elections for more than two decades. This is not my opinion.

These are conclusions of international observers. Putin essentially finished off elections in our country. as soon as he came to power. But even in the conditions of fully controlled elections, it is really telling that the Kremlin is afraid to allow even moderate anti-war voices on the ballot. This happened two years ago in 2024 with Boris Nadejdin, who tried to run for the presidency of Russia

on an anti-war ticket. And suddenly there were hundreds of thousands of people all over the country waiting to sign his ballot petitions. The Kremlin was afraid they didn't allow him on the ballot. And we're seeing this today again now with Yablako, the only opposition party left in Russia, the only anti-war party left in Russia, whose candidates are being harassed, arrested, indicted,

and everything, the Kremlin's trying to do everything to make sure that they're not actually present on the ballot in September. If, in fact, there is a sort of tenuous happenings with the Kremlin and there's concern, and we hear about the paranoia from Vladimir Putin as well, why is the international community or what is it going to take for the international community to grasp that moment? You know, that's a really good question, and I would join you in asking it, Rebecca, because, you know, for so many years, first of all,

Western leaders have been frankly complicit in helping Putin strengthen his regime, strengthen his dictatorship. You know, we've seen American presidents of both parties over the years, look into Putin's eyes and see his soul, declare resets in relations with him and so on. We saw European leaders count out to Putin, probably the most egregious example is Gerhardt, the former Chancellor of Germany, who actually sold himself to Vladimir Putin very literally. It took the largest military conflict in Europe since the... end of the Second World War, which is what Putin war in Ukraine is, to open the eyes of many Western

leaders. But even today, I mean, you just heard the Ukrainian member of parliament. She's absolutely right that the current American administration is basically siding with Vladimir Putin in this war of aggression, not with Ukraine. And so it is really important for countries like Canada to lead on the position of principle in international affairs and to make sure that international affairs are not only about, you know, frozen assets or investment opportunities or sanctions, but that they're also about principles and values. I'm here in Ottawa because yesterday I testified before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Canadian House of Commons on the need to strengthen the Magnitsky sanctions mechanism

that Canada has the human rights sanctions legislation to strengthen it, to close the loopholes that has allowed dictatorial regimes like Putin's, but many others too, evade those sanctions. And I very much hope that there is cross-party consensus here in, Canada in a Canadian Parliament to make sure that sanctions mechanism is strength. And the private members bill would allow for sanctions when foreign states such as Russia harass someone like you are harm critics here in Canada. And what kind of difference could that make? We only have about a minute left. But I'm curious your thoughts on why it would be important to have this bill go ahead. Well, this bill does, as you said, this is Bill C-219, James Bizan's

private member's bill. It does add transnational repression to the list of sanctions offenses. But the most important aspect of this legislation to me is the requirement. that the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada produces an annual report detailing the situation with prisoners of conscience, with political prisoners in dictatorial regimes around the world, and the efforts of the Canadian government to advocate in their behalf and to secure their release. The only reason I'm sitting here with you in studio in Ottawa now,

instead of still being stuck in my solitary confinement cell in Siberia, is because of the international prisoner exchange in 2024 that only became possible after sustained advocacy by international leaders, including here in Canada. there are thousands of political prisoners in Russia today. Many of them are dying. It is a question of life or death, literally. And we need to continue these efforts.

We need to continue the international advocacy to make sure that those people whose only quote-unquote crime was to have a conscience and to stand up against a brutal dictator and a murderous war that those people are released and return to their homes.

Okay. Vladimir, thank you for dropping by our studio today. Thank you for this. Thank you so much for inviting me. Vladimir Kera Mirza is a Russian opposition politician and dissident and a contributing columnist at the Washington Post. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening.

I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.