Alexei Navalny's jailing will boost his popularity and spark more protests against Vladimir Putin's regime, Leonid Volkov, the Kremlin critic's close ally who currently lives in Lithuania, said on Wednesday.
In an interview with BNS, Volkov says European countries should freeze the regime's assets, as Putin’s allies are spending dirty money in Europe, thus corrupting its politics.
From Vilnius, Volkov coordinates Navalny's regional network and likens his role to that of a foreign minister.
Last week, Russian law-enforcement charged Volkov with encouraging minors to attend protests. He dismissed the charges as “made up” and unfounded.
Excerpts from the interview in the video:
What will the [opposition's] strategy be after the jailing of Navalny?
The strategy is called a strategy, not a tactic, because it doesn't depend on single events. [...] We always had a long-term strategy which is to make Russia a European country based on the rule of law, to get rid of Vladimir Putin and his regime, to get to a peaceful transit of power, to become the largest political power in the country, [...] so that such a transition becomes unavoidable.
And this strategy didn't change. [...] What happened yesterday [Tuesday, Navalny getting a jail sentence] is, I would say, part of that strategy.
When Alexei decided that he will return, anticipating possible arrests, possible consequences, he was also acting within our strategy, which is to raise people's awareness about how corrupt and rotten the regime is, to raise people's awareness about the alternative, to attract more followers and supporters. And so, it's happening. [...]
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Now, when Alexei is in prison, he will quite naturally become a symbol of the protest and will attract a lot of attention. And our goal is to increase the number of supporters, to increase Alexei's approval ratings, decrease Vladimir Putin's approval ratings, so that transition and change are inevitable.
Last week, Russia's investigative committee charged you in absentia with, as they said, inviting young people to protest. How can you respond to those charges?
This whole campaign was completely made up because we never addressed specifically minors, we were addressing the Internet, the wide audience about what's going on, what's happening with the Navalny case, his poisoning, his investigation.
Of course, there are also people under 18 who follow the news and want to understand what's going on. When I was a young boy, I was following the dramatic events of 1989, 1991, because it was not possible not to follow them, because the whole country was following these events, discussing these events and the whole country was emotionally involved. And it's a very good thing that young people get emotionally involved with the injustice that is happening in Russia.
Read more: From Belarus to Russia, crackdowns on protest signal erosion of authority
But we never addressed them specifically; we never made a case about young people. Our movement is a popular movement; we address all age groups, all sociodemographic groups, and the polling shows that, for instance, in Moscow on January 23 less than five percent of participants of the rallies were under the age of 18, which is actually even less than usual.
So, once again, this whole campaign was very much made up. [...] The funny thing is that they blamed me for doing this campaign on TikTok, where I don't have an account.
Do you have any fear or serious concern that the Russian government will try to use Interpol or other instruments to seek your arrest?
This article of the Russian penal code is made up, it never existed, it only appeared several months ago, incitement of minors for these types of activity, and I am the first person in Russia ever to be accused of this. [Under] this article, it is not a severe crime and technically you could only perform a national search. Legally, they don't even have a cause to go to Interpol.
Of course, ‘legal’, as we know [and] as we all have seen, does not mean that much for the Russian police and other agencies [...]. And actually we have seen in the past how Russia and China, for instance, are trying to instrumentalise Interpol, to weaponize it, to use it against their political opponents, as they do it with FATF (the Financial Action Task Force).
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And how they used the convention of mutual legal assistance while Alexei Navalny was in Berlin in coma. And after that they tried to use this convention of mutual legal assistance to get information from Germany about his poisoning, pretending like they need it for the investigation, but, of course, they only wanted to squeeze some data from Germany in order to learn how to lie better, [...] pretending it was not poisoning.
Russia is very good in abusing such international tools. [...] It could happen also with this case, but so far so good, I feel safe in Lithuania. [...]
I am not applying for asylum and I am not going to apply for asylum. I don't consider myself to be in asylum because I am sure that all these accusations and charges against me are just made up.
What are now your activities here?
My activities are not here, my activities are there [in Russia]. So I am the chief of staff of Alexey Navalny's regional network of political offices. I manage 180 employees in 40 offices all across Russia from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok and I manage all regional and municipal political campaigns that we make in Russia.
We have won several campaigns in Novosibirsk and Tomsk and some other regions last year and now we are preparing for the Duma elections, scheduled for September. We are very inclined to defeat United Russia, Putin's party, in as many districts as possible.
That's my activity and, frankly, nothing has changed since I moved to Vilnius, because my office in Khabarovsk or my office in Lipsk doesn't really care if I manage them from Moscow or from Vilnius.
Secondly, last year gave us all a lesson in distributed work, using Zoom and so on. So nothing much changes, but now that I am here, with these recent developments, one more thing was added on my regular workload [...], international relations. I am, so to say, Navalny's foreign minister now, because we have to deal a lot with international authorities, governments.
I was just talking to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. I am in contact with the European Parliament and different ministries just because we need to facilitate this work around personal sanctions against Putin's closest allies and to help and build a strategy for the rebuttal of Putin's recent ordeals and activities. So it's something that I did very actively before the lockdown: going to Brussels every month to meet some people and I hope I'll continue it after the pandemic as well.
What specific reactions do you expect from the European Union, from the United States?
Very plain and simple. We have revealed, with this Putin's Palace investigation, that the only thing President Putin really cares about is money. He is just a very nasty leprechaun with a pot of gold.
He had unlimited resources; he could accomplish anything, having all Russian resources, money and talent. And our investigation revealed that his dream is just a huge palace, red carpets and gold everywhere. We managed to prove that he really cares only about money, not his geopolitical standing or making Russia great again.
So the strategy should be to go after money. There is a lot of Putin's money in Europe. Russian official data suggest that the flow of capital from Russia is over 60 billion US dollars. Unofficial data is, I think, much higher.
So at least dozens or hundreds of billions of Russian taxpayers' money are being stolen and exported from Russia and people buy houses, flats in Mayfair, chateaus in France, villas in Jurmala, whatever. This is all very dirty money that corrupts and rots European institutions.
If I am a Russian oligarch or if I am a Russian deputy minister and if I manage to steal a couple of million euros and I buy myself a house in Jurmala, then the next thing I will very naturally do is to buy myself a local municipal councilor, a local judge, a local policeman [...], just because I don't want them to ask questions about the sources of my funds.
That's how exporting corruption works; that's how corruption rots political institutions. We've seen a lot of this. We see many European politicians on Putin's payroll. We've seen members of the European Parliament, like Thierry Mariani of France or even Marine Le Pen, going to Crimea and announcing that the Crimea referendum of 2014 was purely democratic and just brilliantly organised. We see many German politicians of the AfD party being just ready to say whatever Putin asks them to say.
So Putin exports a lot of money, first of all, to Europe and uses this money to corrupt and destroy European political institutions. So the rebuttal should focus on this money. Go after money, seize assets of Putin's closest friends, allies, of Putin's oligarchs, investigate how money comes from Russia to European political systems and cut off those channels, because it is also essential for the European political institutions to persist. It is not only for Russia, it's in the best interest of Europe as well.
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