Navalny ally calls on West to invest in Russia’s next generation to beat Putin

Exclusive: Leonid Volkov tells The Independent’s Tom Watling: ‘The vast majority of anti-Putin, anti-war, opposition-minded Russians are still inside the country, and they’re not changing their minds’

Leonid Volkov says Alexei Navalny’s death left a huge hole in Russia’s opposition (AFP/Getty)

The West needs to invest in Russia’s future generation now and support those fighting against Vladimir Putin from inside the country after Alexei Navalny’s death left a huge hole in the opposition, the dissident’s former chief of staff says.

Navalny – Putin’s most significant critic – was announced dead in February, at the remote prison colony in the Arctic where he was serving a sentence on charges decried as trumped up. Western leaders lined up to say Putin was responsible for his death, while Navalny’s widow, Yulia, has also repeatedly said that the Russian president killed her husband.

Leonid Volkov, a close friend of Navalny, also calls it a murder, one that dealt a “severe blow” to the fight against Putin.

“He always managed to catch Putin by surprise and do something really unexpected,” Volkov tells The Independent. That’s something we miss a lot now. There’s really no replacement for that.”

It has also brought into sharp relief, he believes, that “no one in the West really knows what they want Russia to look like after Putin”. The president’s latest act was to threaten war on Nato if the US and UK allow Ukrainian forces to fire Western-supplied long-range missiles deep into Russia in their fight against the invaders.

“Europe needs a peaceful, democratic, predictable neighbour and trade partner,” Navalny’s former chief of staff continues. “Europe definitely doesn’t need 20 small states fighting against each other for control over nuclear weapons, nor does it need a giant North Korea behind a huge wall, which would be an imminent source of threat.”

Volkov with the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, in Germany in 2021 (Leonid Volkov)

Without a strategy, he suggests, that is where Russia could be heading, though the opposition will always be waiting poised in the wings should Putin’s regime come to an abrupt end.

Central to such a rethought, Western strategy should be the abandonment of “vehement discrimination” against Russian citizens.

Responding to an op-ed in Foreign Affairs by the former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice in which she called for the West to “keep some connection to the Russian people”, Volkov says it is vital to “invest now in [Russia’s] next generations”.

“If we want Russia to be a peaceful, democratic society, then of course we should invest now in students and the next generations, to promote cultural and scientific exchange,” he says. “We have to endorse young people who want to go and study abroad because they will be building this new democratic Russia.

“Closing the borders and trying to discriminate against Russians in Europe only helps Putin’s propaganda.”

In March, less than a month after Navalny died, Volkov was attacked outside his then home in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius by pro-Russian men wielding a hammer. He described the attack as “an obvious, typical, gangster greeting from Putin”.

Volkov’s car is taken away after the attack outside his home earlier this year (AFP/Getty)

However, when asked if more open Russian borders would present a security threat, the opposition figure shrugs off the question.

“That’s what the security services are paid for, to analyse, to prevent, to tackle the threats,” he says. “It is vehement discrimination to label Russian citizens who are travelling from Russia as a security threat.”

This view will be seen by many, not least the Ukrainians who see all Russians as complicit in Putin’s rise to power and eventual invasion of Ukraine, as controversial, if not impossible.

But Volkov’s view is rooted in the idea that there is still a huge “majority” of people inside Russia waiting for the “winds of change”.

He claims that only seven or eight per cent of Russian society “strongly support Putin”. A further 60 per cent form the “silent majority” that stay out of politics and simply want peace. The rest, roughly 30 to 40 per cent, are opposed to Putin.

“What Putin has done through all these years is amplify the voice of the 7 or 8 per cent of this very aggressive minority while silencing the 30 per cent opposed,” he says.

“So those 60 per cent in the middle live in a world where the only socially acceptable view they hear is from the pro-war minority. They believe that this minority is actually the majority and that everyone is supporting Putin and the war. This is a stable construction for Putin but it can flip literally overnight.

“When the minority realises it’s actually a minority and the majority realises it’s actually a majority, then what will happen will be what happened in Eastern bloc countries in the late 1980s or what happened during the Arab spring.”

The West needs to support Russians fighting against Vladimir Putin, Volkov says (via Reuters)

Five months after Navalny died in prison, the few remaining notorious opposition activists inside of Russia, the likes of Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin, for whom Volkov worked as chief of staff before helping Navalny, were exchanged after being jailed for speaking out against the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

They both claimed they were illegally expelled, having been told they could never return to Russia.

Despite this gutting of the various faces of the opposition, however, Volkov claims that “the vast majority of anti-Putin, anti-war, opposition-minded Russians are still inside the country, and they’re not changing their minds”.

Drawing comparisons to the fall of the Soviet Union, he says it is they who must be courted and helped to eventually overthrow Putin’s regime.

“In 1989, you saw tens of millions of people on the streets from East Berlin to Vilnius, from Warsaw to Bucharest, from Moscow to Prague. These were the very same people who had been silenced by repression years earlier.

“But by 1989, they started to realise that something had changed. The wind of change had come, and there was no more appetite for repression. The same will happen in Russia.”

It is, he adds, the role of both the exiled opposition and, crucially, the Western countries that have enacted such a clear “Ukraine strategy”, to support that majority of Russians and come up with a strategy for them, too.

“The only way for us to ensure that Alexei’s ultimate, enormous sacrifice is not in vain is to build this beautiful Russia of the future that he dreamt of, to prove that he was right, that Russia could be a functioning, efficient, eastern European democracy rather than this ugly, fascist dictatorship,” he says.

“We deeply believe – I deeply believe – through all the last years of having the luck and privilege to work with Alexei, that he was on the right side of history.”

Breaking into a rare smile, he adds: “Now we have to prove it.”