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

‘The vast majority of anti-Putin, anti-war Russians are not changing their minds, Leonid Volkov tells Tom Watling

- Tom Watling

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.”

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.