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Dissident: “Without Putin the war in Ukraine would end immediately”

“If Vladimir Putin slipped on a banana peel and died tomorrow, the war in Ukraine would end immediately,” a key opposition figure in Russia, Leonid Volkov, chief of staff to the imprisoned leader of the Russian Federation, told Australian national ABC. opposition Alexei Navalny. “The invasion does not have the support of either Russian public opinion or the elites” – he says – “and it is entirely a project of the president”. Volkov has been on a one-week visit to Australia since yesterday to meet senior federal officials in Canberra and representatives of Foreign Minister Penny Wong. His message is that only severe economic, military and political measures on Russia could cause enough pressure on Putin to make him go wrong. “Putin equals war,” Volkov insisted. “Putin won’t want to, and he won’t be able to stop. He won’t be able to admit that he has lost, that he was wrong”. The military weight of opposition to Putin rests on the shoulders of the Ukrainian people, he added, but meanwhile the comprehensive sanctions regime hits the Russian economy and causes suffering for both its citizens and its oligarchs. And the task of exerting political pressure is done by organizations such as Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. Volkov acknowledges that it is impossible to accurately gauge public sentiment in Russia towards the war because state TV is a propaganda machine and dissent has been criminalized, while Putin has long encouraged a political apathy among ordinary people. However the Anti-Corruption Foundation, now in exile in Lithuania, has tried to gauge the level of support for the war by using indirect questions in polls. “We asked people how they would like public money to be spent if there was more of it in the Russian budget and less than 10% said they were in favor of more military spending, despite propaganda telling them 24 hours a day ‘we are at war. with NATO, and we must invest everything we have to defeat NATO.’ We can deduce that there is no popular support for the war,” Navalny’s ally said.