The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Ilya Budraitskis:

Welcome to Solidarity Without Exception. I’m Ashley Smith. Blanca m and I are co-hosts of this podcast. It is sponsored by the Ukraine Solidarity Network and produced by The Real News Network. Today we are joined by Russian activist Ksenia Kagarlitskaya and Ilya Budraitskis to discuss Vladimir Putin’s regime, his imperialist war in Ukraine, conditions inside Russia, and the prospects for anti-war and working class resistance. Ksenia Kagarlitskaya is the daughter of well-known Marxist Boris Kagarlitsky, who was jailed by Putin for his opposition to the war in Ukraine, she initiated the Freedom Zone, which is an activist campaign that supports Russian political prisoners. Ilya Budraitskis is a Russian theorist, activist and member of postal media, a left-wing anti-war platform founded after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. His collection of essays, dissonance among dissidents, ideology, politics, and the left and post-Soviet Russia was published by Verso in 2022. Both are in exile from Russia.

They, along with hundreds of thousands of other Russians, have fled Putin’s repression of any and all political descent after the start of the war in Ukraine. His government has undergone a dramatic transformation from a managed democracy into an authoritarian regime over the last couple of decades. Many now call it Neofascist. Putin carried out this transformation beginning in the two thousands and consolidated it in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the collapse of the commodities boom and the drop in oil prices. He faced a growing opposition movement within Russia, an increasing resistance in its former empire. Alexi Navalny spearheaded a democratic movement throughout Russia. While in countries like Ukraine, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Serbia, people rose up in waves of revolts against oligarchic capitalism and for justice, democracy and equality. On top of that, Putin was confronted with states in Russia’s sphere of influence joining the European Union and NATO.

He responded with wars abroad and repression at home. He waged a brutal war in Chechnya from 1999 through 2009, attacked and annex parts of Georgia in 2008. Seized Crimea in sections of the Donbas from Ukraine in 2014 intervened in Syria to save Bashar al-Assad’s tyrannical regime in 2015, and finally invaded Ukraine in 2022 where he is waged an unrelenting war. To this day within Russia, he passed a foreign agent law to tar and feather any dissident. As a pawn of the US and NATO accusing them of fomenting color revolution, he crushed Navalny pro-democracy movement. In 2011 with repression of protest and imprisonment of activists, Putin had Navalny poisoned and then thrown in jail where he eventually died In 2024, Putin consolidated his authoritarian regime after his invasion of Ukraine. He repressed anti-war protests, jailed thousands of activists and drove 650,000 people into exile. Putin now leads a far right, if not Neofascist state.

He and his cleek rule through repression treat any dissent as treason and jail activists who dare resist his rule. Most recently, the regime sentence, five activists in a Marxist discussion group to 20 years in prison in alliance with patriarch hero’s Russian Orthodox Church. It has imposed so-called traditional values, criminalizing LGBTQ, people enforcing a protist agenda on women and limiting their access to abortion. After four years of horrific war in Ukraine, in repression, in Russia, Ksenia Kagarlitskaya and Ilya Budraitskis explained the nature and evolution of Putin’s regime, the plight of its political prisoners and the prospects for anti-war resistance and class struggle. They call for solidarity against Russia’s war, and for the freeing of Boris Kagarlitsky and the thousands of others trapped in Putin’s new Gulag. Welcome both Ilya and Ksenia to solidarity without exception. I’m so glad you could join us this afternoon.

Ksenia Kagarlitskaya:

Thank you so much. Hello. Thank you for advising.

Ashley Smith:

Yeah, thank you so much for having us. So both of you are in exile from Russia, along with hundreds of thousands of others who’ve fled the country. After Vladimir Putin launched his imperialist war in Ukraine, those that remain live under an increasingly autocratic regime. What’s the nature of Putin’s regime and how has it evolved over the last couple of decades?

Ilya Budraitskis:

So the first thing to say that now it’s almost 26 years since this regime was established, and definitely within this period you can trace some evolution, some evolution of its political and social structure. So from the very beginning, this regime started as a sort of continuation of so-called market neoliberal reforms in Russia. In first few years of his rule, Putin introduced such important now liberal measures as flat docks, as new labor legislation, which significantly limited workers’ rights. He pushed privatization of land, of urban infrastructure, but in the same time, this regime was conservative and imperialist from the very beginning. So Putin started his rule with the second war in Chechnya, which was extremely brutal. But in terms of foreign policy, this regime from the beginning was different. Was different in the sense that Putin tried to build some sort of anti-terrorist or counter-terrorist aligns with George Bush.

He supported the so-called war on terror of Bush administration, and he provided significant assistance for US military operation in Afghanistan in early two thousands. But then definitely he turned to the mostly anti-Western type of politics. And I think the main points on this way are 2011, the moment when he decided to return to his position as the president and both confronted with huge protests in Moscow and other major cities of Russia. And I think that since that moment, he became preoccupied with sort of conspiracy sinking, conspiracy sinking in terms that you have west, the west, some western elites behind any protest, behind any attempt to question the right of this government to rule the country and to question the very nature of this cratic and Personalistic regime. And then after suppression of protests in Russia, inside Russia, he expanded this conspiracy Syria in the moment of Maidan movement in Ukraine in 2014.

So in this sense, the annexation of Crimea start of Russian military involvement in Donbas in 2014 in some way came as continuation of his anti-revolutionary reactionary politics inside the country. So in this way, you can see how in his very ideological vision, the questions of let’s say internal and external politics, they merged together in some sort of grand conspiracy conspiracy sinking picture of the wolf. And just few days ago, he made such a statement that with the, so he said literally that with the beginning of so-called special military operation in Ukraine, the western plan was to defeat Russia in the few weeks. But this plan failed.

You can see some very serious logical rupture here. So Putin started his war, but in his mind it was a part of some hidden western plan to destroy Russia. So within his ideological worldview, even his own decision to start this bloody war was provoked by the west. So it was not his own decision, it was just inevitable reaction to some general anti-Russian plot established by the west. Yeah, so I think that you can see how during this quarter of century his position moved from neoliberal conservative position to extreme, extreme semi fascist conspiracy, Syria influenced worldview.

Ashley Smith:

That’s really profound, the transformation that you’re documenting and talking about. So let’s talk a little bit more about the war, and obviously it’s had a devastating impact on the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian country and the Ukrainian economic conditions and put a severe strain on the entire society, but it’s also impacted Russian society in a dramatic fashion. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers have lost their lives, lost their limbs, been wounded. So I just have a question about what impact the war has had inside Russia. Where is Putin getting these soldiers that get sent to the front lines and sacrificed for this imperial project, what has been the impact on the economy, the society, and the lives of working people inside Russia? And how are people thinking about the war inside Russia today?

Ksenia Kagarlitskaya:

Yeah, thank you. I just wanted to add to the previous speech that Ilia had. I totally agree that Putin regime evolved during this time and at this moment is semi fascist regime. I want to add some statistics. We’ve never had so many political prisoners. This war is a great excuse to make those political prisoners, and I don’t agree with the idea that in his mind he really thought that it was western provocation to start this war. I think you just can’t say that. You just can’t make the statement, I just wanted to start the war because I wanted to stay president as long as possible. So that’s why I decided to start this war. You can’t say that. That’s why you try to create those western plans, Ukrainian Nazis and et cetera, et cetera, to explain those reasons. I think it’s this way. And Putin always says different things.

Firstly, he said he has no reason to take Crimea. Then he took Crimea, then he told that he would never change the constitution for his wills to stay longer, then he did it. Then he said that while he’s the president, he’ll never raise the retirement age, then he did it. So then he said that there will be no war with Ukraine. Something like two weeks ago he said that there will be no war with NATO. So let’s wait because totally the opposite always happens. And speaking about the second question about how the society has changed, this war has influenced everyone who lives in Russia, who lives in Ukraine. For those who live in Ukraine, it’s different, totally different because now, I don’t know, in 24 and 25, I don’t live in Russia those years, but I think they feel the war more because they have the drones going everywhere, some other bombs, et cetera.

But mostly the real war happens in Ukraine. So Russians don’t feel this war this way, but many people have relatives who are in this war or have people who went to the immigration and live in exile. Right now we have 4,000 political prisoners and all of them have their relatives. So this influence to everyone, I don’t know a person who just says what happened? We had this memo in the beginning of the war, what happened? And now I think there is no people who don’t know about the war and don’t feel this influence into their lives.

Ilya Budraitskis:

So first thing to say that actually I agree with Ksenia because I mean within the ideological vision of the world, there is no contradiction between your willing to stay in power forever and your idea that you have a special mission to save the country from some western plot to destroy, to destroy it as a state. So I mean, it’s quite obvious that when you are in power for 25 years, your mind, your vision of your own place in the world evolved in some particular way. So speaking about the impact of the war, so definitely this war is the most devastating war for the country since World War ii. You have already more than 200,000 Russian soldiers die, at least. Yes. So probably they’re much more, you have hundreds of thousands who already got military experience who were drafted to the army, or most of them were recruited for money on so-called volunteer basis.

And it’s important to notice that at least three more than 300,000 criminals, people from prisons were recruited in this way to the Russian army. So now you have a lot of such people who already got some military experience there, and it’s really hard to predict consequences for the country when the war will be over. But of course, many of those who were drafted or who were recruited on commercial commercial basis, they came from the most poor backgrounds. They came from small provincial towns from working class families. Many of them were motivated to sign this contract with the Russian army because of their huge loans for their apartments or for education of their children and so on. And you can say that you have a significant majority of Russians who honestly supported honestly support this war. So it’s still mostly the adventure of the elites supported by some chauvinist, pro imperialist minority of the Russian society, then real like a popular war as it presented by the Russian propaganda. But in the same time, you have a huge atomization and conformity spread in the Russian society and repressions, and I totally agree with Xenia because since the beginning of this war, Russia experienced such a wave of repressions that could be comparable only with Stalins time. So it’s already much more massive and severe than in the late Soviet period, for example. So these repressions, they definitely created atmosphere of fear, of distrust where widely presented in the Russian society and prevented many people from expression of their real attitude to the war.

Ashley Smith:

Yeah, let’s turn to that now, because at the start of the war there was significant opposition. There were street protests, there were people taking actions, there were people going on television expressing their dissent with the war. What happened to all that? How did Putin respond? And Ksenia in particular, talk a little bit about how many people have been jailed and what the conditions are like for these thousands of people that have been thrown into jail.

Ksenia Kagarlitskaya:

The conditions are not really good for many political prisoners. They face with the different tortures or they start hunger strikes because of those tortures with different kinds of tortures. For example, we have this Zo is the punishment isolator, and there is a Geneva convention and there is written there that no more than 15 days in a row you can spend in this shaza and their normal practices to send you to Shaza. Then you spend there 15 days, then they release you for one hour and then you go back to Shaza and then go back and go back. It would be 45, 60 days. So formally they don’t break any rules, but they do. And we know many different and really tragic stories. We know stories when for one political prisoner, he needed an operation for his teeth and he didn’t get the medical support for one year, and then they realized that the situation is going to dissent to its end.

They just released him because of his health conditions and in one week he did, he was dead because he needed that help for one year and he didn’t receive this help. And this was like a common operation which you could do in one day when you are free. So we know different stories. We have a list of dead political prisoners and this list counts more than 15 people. So we already are on the step where political prisoners die there. And we all know the story of Navalny of course, because he’s the most famous political prisoners, but there are many others who faced with the same problems. We had this talented piano musician bible, so we just didn’t know that name before his death. So yes, the conditions are really difficult there. And the political prisoners who are there, they’re really true heroes. And the people who even they support us, we write letters to those political prisoners.

We share our thoughts, our conditions, like picking about myself, I was sharing about my depression or about my bad mood or something like that. And they find the power inside to support me and I’m totally in better conditions than they are, and they find this strength. So they’re true heroes. But there are different political prisoners. They’re political prisoners who just wrote a post or there are political prisoners who made some diversions with the army or I’m not sure. There are cases which are not really strict. For example, there is a case of that awa who, because of her, she gave, I need to tell the whole story. There was a propaganda journalist Ky, that journalist that is the letter of the war. So she gave him a present with a little statue and the statue contained a bump. So the bump exploded and many people died including this ky.

So many people died because of her action. So this could not be the clear political prisoner’s case. And she tells that she didn’t know what’s inside this present. So nobody knows. So we have different cases, but we have cases like my father’s, he was punished for just a title on YouTube, which was not obvious that has anything to get him to the prison. So we have different ones and we find new and new ones. I write letters to different political prisoners and I always ask a question, do you know anybody else who is there with you? So we could add them to the list because we have a huge spreadsheet with all people who are being repaired in different ways, not only in prison, they could get some fees or domestic arrest or home arrest, I don’t know. So when they spend their time at home and they can go out. So there are different types and this list counts 4,000 people, which is enormous. Like Ilya said, it’s like in Stalin’s time or even worse. So yeah.

Ashley Smith:

Now Ilya, what happened to the protests and why were they so effectively driven underground? And is there any remnant of that organizing that’s still active either domestically or internationally? What does the kind of anti-war opposition look like today?

Ilya Budraitskis:

So the first thing to say that Putin prepared in terms of politics, in terms of repressions, he already prepared country for a huge war, at least start starting from 2011 and especially 2014. So he destroyed the main structures of organized political opposition inside the country, including of course Alexei Navalny network, which was totally destroyed and labeled as extremist organization a year before war started. He already destroyed the main human rights organization before the war. For example, Memorial, the most important and well-known Russian human rights group was officially banned just a few months before war was started. So when he declared the beginning of so-called special miniature operation, Russian opposition already was quite disorganized. And I remember this few days of the war when some people tried to make some public protests say in Moscow and in St. Petersburg, and there was already no any clear organizing force behind it.

So it was really easy for Russian authorities to destroy all this protest in a few first weeks. And then number of very repressive law where introduced on so-called dissertation of the Russian army on so-called distribution of fake information about special military operation. And this repressive legislation is still under development, so it’s still growing. And even now you have more and more and new repressive laws like common through the Russian parliament. So all of this laws, all of this restrictions, they contributed to this general atmosphere of fear when people, they’re afraid not just to speak publicly, but they afraid to even to talk honestly, to discuss the current political events with their colleagues, with their friends. So in order to talk about the war and its impact on the Russian society, you have to know the other person quite well. You have to be sure that this person will not report on you next day because there were a lot of cases like this already. And that is the real purpose of all this repressive legislation, not just to punish people, not just to put them in prison, but to give such examples for society in general. And unfortunately, this strategy is quite effective. So now we definitely can see very serious level of self-censorship in the Russian society where it’s not possible to prove the real level of anti-war sentiments, which seems to be really high, but it’s really hard to prove it because of this general atmosphere of fear and distrust.

Ksenia Kagarlitskaya:

I totally agree with Ilya and I wanted to add one story about one political prisoner to illustrate that what Ilia has said. I think there strategy work smarter, not hard, they don’t need to put everyone in prison. For example, a case of Naje. She is a pediatric, she’s a doctor and nobody knows. Did she say it for real or she didn’t, but her patient told that she told something bad about Putin or something against the war. So this patient reported her and there’s BNA got imprisoned and she was sentenced to five or six years for justifying terrorism that was decided though they don’t need to put all doctors in prison, they just show us the case and all the doctors just know that we don’t need to tell anything during we have patients. And this way you shut up all the doctors without putting everybody to jail. It’s just this case, just illustration of what Ilya said.

Ashley Smith:

Yeah. I wanted to turn to your own experience Ksenia, because your father has been one of the targets of Putin’s repression and he’s been one of the most prominent leftists who’ve been arrested and jailed for opposing the war. Can you tell us a little bit about your father, Boris Kagarlitsky and his significance to the Russian left and why did Putin target him in particular and what conditions does he face?

Ksenia Kagarlitskaya:

My father is in hospital right now, which is still prison hospital, but it’s hospital. So it’s good news, he has bad health conditions, but we need to remember that he’s 67 years old and nobody becomes healthier in prison, even younger people. So when you’re 67 years old, this affects you in a bad way. But the good news is that they put him into the hospital and the conditions in the hospital are much better than prison. And I hope he’ll spend there as much time as possible because he rests there. It is allowed to lay down on the bed during the day because in prison you just wake up and then you just need to be awake on your legs during the whole day and then you go to sleep only at night. And we also have started this campaign about his health conditions to put him into the hospital.

And in the week before the hospital they put him in Shaza. So this was a sign for us not to be. So I don’t know. So don’t feel about them in a nice way because I know many political prisoners, I know many relatives of them. We communicate a lot. We have a chat of political prisoners, relatives, and I know their conditions. And honestly speaking, their conditions are much worse and these conditions are much worse, not only in the cell conditions or something like that. They most important thing is how they treat you. How do they feel? You’re like a person because my father has good relationships with the panel colon administrations, and this thing could change in any moment. This she’s a case was one of the signs we’re not that nice as you could think of us. And I think the reason, let’s speak about my father.

I don’t know how to say it genetically correct way, but I think he is a most well-known Marxist in the world right now. He has published more than 18 books in different universities of the world. They read his books and they study on his books. But in Russia, even now, you can buy his books in different online marketplaces, but they’re not forbidden. So this is good news. And he was arrested in the year 2023. His article is Justified Terrorism. I read the case, the whole materials of the case, they have nothing to say about the article was about his video on YouTube. And in the material of the case, there is nothing about the video itself, only about the title. The title was explosive. Congratulations of Cat Moss. Cat is a famous cat in Ukraine. So this video is dedicated to analysis of premier breach explosion, which took place in October, 2022.

And he was arrested only in July, 2023. So for 10 months this video was online and nobody told anything about something is wrong with this video or the title is not correct. And I think that the reason is that they didn’t know what to find to get him in prison. And he was not okay for the government. He was against the war and he didn’t hide this position. He never did. He had his own YouTube media with many subscribers who followed him. And this is really dangerous for Russian authorities, really dangerous. So they could not leave this happen for any longer. So they just found this video, which was uploaded 10 months ago to get him arrested. And also police came, not FSB, not police. They came to five people more not only to Boris, five people who worked with the rap corps, the media. My father was the chief editor of Rap Corps before the imprisonment.

So five people from RAP Corps, they met FSB in their houses, but no of them got arrested. But my father, so this is the case. And now he spent in Czo is like, I dunno, detention jail or something like that where you spent time before the court. So he spent there for six months in Kar. The city is really far away from Moscow, more than 1000 kilometers from Moscow. And the lawyer could not come to this first court because he just didn’t find any flights or he didn’t find a way to come there for a thousand kilometers is a really big. So then there was the court where the verdict of the court was just the fee. It’s also a bad decision because it’s like you guilty because if you’re not guilty, you don’t get anything. And their vertical was the fee and the fee was 609,000 troubles, something about $6,000, something like that.

So it was a big fee, but we started as a fundraiser. So the fee was collected in one day and my father two months before my father was designated as a terrorist and extremist. So there is another law that if you’re a terrorist and extremist, you can’t spend more than 10,000 rebels per month. There is a law it’s written and he got that fee of $6,000. So there is a logic problem here that he couldn’t pay this fee, but he found a way to pay it. It was really complicated, but he found this way and then the prosecutor came with an appeal that the punishment is too light. And the other thing is the argument, which is hilarious that he couldn’t pay this fee and he already did. And only after that the prosecutor came with this appeal and the second court took place. My father was really, he had a good mood that day.

He didn’t think this second court will end with something else with, he thought that they will remain the same decision. That was before he was ready to go to a cafe. After this court people were waiting and then the verdict changed in 180 degrees from fee to a real arrest of five years. And this is not possible even in modern Russia when someone comes with an appeal, doesn’t matter the lawyer side or the prosecutor side, they could change your verdict a little. For example, from 6,000 to 7,000 or five or from five years to four or six. But they do change from eight to Z, the whole verdict. And now we still fight for my dad. By me, I mean the whole international campaign and the huge Russian media campaign that we have rap corps, they still exist even without my fathers. And I also think this is true heroism to keep existing without your chef editor who’s imprisoned and they’re in Russia, they never left Russia. So I think that is how the Jews are today and he’s still there. We still fight and the conditions are better than others have, but not that good.

Ashley Smith:

Do you have anything to add about the significance of Boris and his struggle for freedom and its significance to the left in Russia and internationally?

Ilya Budraitskis:

Yes, probably. I will add just a few words. Of course. Boris is a veteran of the left-wing politics in Russia. He is active on the left for most of his life since the eighties. It’s his second prison dorm. So the first one was in the early eighties when he was a member of a socialist dissident group and he was in prison under BNI and on dropoff. So basically you can see within his life how all the political changes happened and how the real left, how the real revolutionary Marxist upholds all sort of political regimes, even they pretended to be communist or mex themselves as it was in the late Soviet period. And of course his anti-war stance since the start of the full scale invasion of Ukraine was remarkable. It was very important for Russian left in general, and I think that was the main reason why he was arrested.

It was also symbolic in a way. It was not just about him, but it was about the whole political spectrum. And it’s important to know that Boris is not the only one left-wing political prisoner for now. You have many of them just recently, a few people were sentenced to more than 20 years for just having a Mex reading group in the city of Russia. So I mean, if you have such a prison terms like 20 years or more in a case like this. So it’s definitely already comparable with stalls times. So it was unimaginable, even in the late Soviet period in the moment of the struggle against Soviet, a dissident, you couldn’t imagine that people would be arrested just for their views, just for their internal debates for 20 years. And I think that it’s absolutely crucial to keep this public attention, this international attention to what has happening with Boris. The reason why he finally was hospitalized that he got some basic medical care in prison, all of that happened only because of this high attention inside Russia, among Russian political immigration and among international left-wing community. So in this sense, his life is very much now rely on you, all your support and your solidarity.

Ashley Smith:

Yes, now let’s turn back to the war again because the Trump administration in collaboration with Putin’s regime are clearly trying to push a peace deal, some kind that rewards in the case of what Trump and Putin have put forward. Russia’s colonial aggression and annexation not only of territory, it’s conquered, but whole sections of the Donbas that it hasn’t actually seized. And so there’s a real push from them. And then on the other hand, Europe and Ukraine are pushing back and trying to push for a settlement that’s more friendly to Ukraine and also has financial support for the country security guarantees and conditions that allow for the maintenance and expansion of its army to defend itself against Russia. The direction of these talks is unclear. What do you both think will come of the talks and if a settlement of some kind is reached, will it hold or will it be like the other settlements that we’ve seen that’s just on paper for Russia to regroup and then relaunch the war?

Ilya Budraitskis:

Okay, so I think the first important thing here is how each site is written, the current situation. So how Putin is reading it. So first of all he believes that you have a very favorable dynamics on the frontline. Yeah, that Russian army is expanding and that’s the main factor during this ongoing negotiations. So as far as Trump is ready to continue this process in parallel with Russian military expansion in Ukraine. So Putin is absolutely comfortable for this combination to continue some peace talks and intensify his military actions in Ukraine, intensify heavy bombardment of Ukrainian cities, mostly touching the energy infrastructure and rise in the price of the war for civilian population of Ukraine. So death for Putin is a part of these negotiations. So all this is coming in the package in one package. So in this sense, it’s quite clear that he’s ready to continue.

I mean he’s ready to continue the war and he’s ready to continue these negotiations for next year by not, he’s absolutely sure that it’ll be not a problem to find a new soldiers to fight in the Russian army for the coming year. That he has enough money to support this very expensive war for the Russian population. And it’s important to know that now nearly 40% of Russian budget, of Russian national budget devoted to expenses to the military expenses, so that that’s his stock and that’s his strategy. And just two days ago he made a statement that Europe is becoming very aggressive and the Europe is wage and the war against Russia. So basically it’s his interpretation of what you actually just call the security guarantees for Ukraine. So from Putin’s point of view, that’s another aggressive and friendly move from Europe, European Union from NATO that has to be responded from his side with the continuation of military actions in Ukraine.

So on the side of Trump’s administration, you see where very wrong understanding of what is called by Russian diplomacy, the root causes of this war. So from various statements coming from Trump’s administration, you can see that they believe that there is some question of the land that Putin probably wants some land and some land exchange should be just organized and that will be the end of this war. Definitely put Putin is not interested in some more piece of Ukrainian land. He is interested in political and military control over the whole country. He’s interested in regime change in Ukraine and he’s interested in some significant changes of the European structure of security in general, especially in the Eastern Europe, in the former states that belong to the Soviet sphere of influence. And especially I am thinking about such places as Baltic states, which could be the next target of Russian military aggression.

Ksenia Kagarlitskaya:

Yeah, I think it’s not, Putin will never end this war because if he just signs any kind of peace negotiations, that means all those people, all those people was dead for nothing. He will need to answer those questions to the society. Why are the prices like that were under sections, why did we have all of that? While the world still continues, he doesn’t need to answer those questions and I think the end of the war will signify the end of Putin’s regime, even if he declares the only thing for him to end the war and to keep the power is to declare total win. And he can’t declare total win this way because nobody won in this war and it still continues. And any kind of peace negotiations will signify weakness for this regime and he could continue those negotiations to pretend a good guy, but he will never sign any of those negotiations I’m sure.

Ashley Smith:

So amidst this so-called peace process, which you’ve both just proven is not really a peace process, it’s a mechanism to buy time and space for continuing the war, not only in Ukraine but in Russia’s sphere of influence because we’re back to the 19th century now with Donald Trump’s new national security. Every great power gets their sphere of influence. So as this all goes on, the political prisoners still languish in jail and ksenia, I wanted to get you to talk a little bit about the freedom zone and the significant work that you’re doing to aid the political prisoners to provide them with legal advice and defense, help them with lawyers and also fight for their freedom from Putin’s new Gulag. So what has the freedom zone been doing with your father’s case and with thousands of other cases?

Ksenia Kagarlitskaya:

To be honest, we don’t work with thousands of cases. We can’t cover all those cases and we receive more and more. Freedom Zone is an initiative that I’m proud of because from a chat of three people, it grew to a giant initiative, which we have more than 70 people across the world who work with Freedom Zone. We do not actually help with lawyers. We make events all across the world. We call them festivals or you can call ’em in any way you like. We pick this word because we have different kind of activities during our events. So different kinds of activities are something like festivals, so we call them festivals. Our goal, we have two big goals when making this initiative. The first one is to collect money because we need enormous sum of money to cover all political prisoners costs. I could describe some of them, but we could never find all of them like they’re new and new and new.

For example, for visits to prison, to pay for the lawyers. And also we’re I think the only one who help families, not only the political prisoners with the problems which are not totally related with the political prisoner, for example, ing for children or I dunno, books for school for children or something like that. Or just they need to pay for their apartment. And we help with that because we know lots of cases when a political prisoner is a main breadwinner in the family and just lost their breadwinner and then they need to pay for those lawyers for those visits, et cetera, et cetera. Many relatives, they lose their jobs because their bosses don’t want to work with them because they think this kind of dangerous, for some reason, many friends don’t want to be your friends anymore because they think this could be dangerous and this may cause problems for them as well and many, many other problems.

And we know that Russian immigration and people in Russia, they’re pretty much exhausted with all those political topics and they’re exhaust in terms of donations. They just don’t have more money to donate. And we decided that we wanted to be really, we wanted to help people and we are in exile so we can make those events in different places. We already had 13 events in 13 different countries including us, A and Canada, and not only in Europe, hopefully one day we’ll make an event in Asia. At the moment we have only Europe and North America, but we’re expanding. So I hope this will be in the future. And we speak with the audience who live in these countries. So we tell them about political prisoners, we show them those problems because mostly people from abroad, they don’t know anything about political prisoners or they just know that they are political prisoners.

That’s it. So we give them information and I see those eyes all the time. What? Everybody’s shocked. Nobody believes us like is this real true? But we sell them. Yes, that’s true. And people get sentenced to many decades for nothing. And that’s this way we collect money from people from abroad to help our Russian political prisoners. But seeing Russian, I mean who are in Russia, but there are many Ukrainians and other people who are Russian political prisoners. And we have different activities. We invite speakers, we invite musicians with their music. So we don’t want to be this heavy all the time. We want to bring some good mood and good emotions after our events. So we combine serious topics with non-serious topics altogether for making those events. Or for example, we made tattoos on our events for donation for political prisoners. So different kind of stuff, but in different activities, I mean really different.

So at the moment we’ve collected more than $15,000 than that’s more than 1 million rebels. That’s a lot. And we continue, the next event will take place in the Riga Atvia by the end of January. And then we have Poland and hopefully Brazil. So these are the three upcoming events and I hope there will be more. So I will just ask the audience to subscribe to our social media. We have everything and we will launch the English social media soon with English posts, articles to inform people from different countries about our situation. So I hope we will launch this English speaking media soon, so stay tuned.

Ashley Smith:

Excellent. Ilya, I wanted to ask you, which sort of builds off the significance of this huge layer of exiles that have left Russia in the wake of the war and what the state of political organizing is among the exile community to build support for political prisoners, but also opposition to the regime in Russia.

Ilya Budraitskis:

Yeah, actually it is pretty difficult question because of course in terms of politics, the Russian opposition and immigration is quite diverse. And I will say that most of leading figures of the supposition, they came from a liberal background liberal, not an American sense of this term, but in Russian understanding, which means what anti-communist pro NATO or kind of these type of politics. But of course you have very different people there. You have some followers of Alexei Navalny who are, let’s say, more progressive in terms of politics. You have such figures as Hari Kasparov, who is very much presented in American media at least who has really rightwing views. And of course it’s hard to say that all the Russian immigrants, they have the same political position, they participate in one broad political coalition. I don’t think that this coalition is possible for the moment and that this coalition is really needed.

I mean, it’s okay that we are very different. We belong to different political traditions. We have a different ideas of future of our country and future of the world in general. But what is really important that we can cap in some exact directions as support for political prisoners as support of the rights of the Russian immigrants abroad because it become a really hot question in United States as well. And of course the spread of alternative of use, alternative, alternative media support of whereas ways to distribute this alternative information is also very important and could be considered as a common task for Russian immigrants abroad.

Ashley Smith:

Excellent. So final question, which is more about the international left and the international progressive movement. So many have been confused, disoriented, and taken really bad positions, frankly about Russia’s imperialist war in Ukraine. Some have justified it as a war in Putin’s terms as self-defense against Western aggression, NATO and US aggression. Others have taken a position of say, apox on both the houses of the West and Russia and ignored Ukraine’s right to self-determination as a secondary or irrelevant question. What position do you think as Russian progressives people on the progressive movement in Russia, what do you think the best position for the international left on Russia, the war Ukraine? What do you both think?

Ilya Budraitskis:

I think it’s quite simple to answer this question because what is going on now? It’s not the war again between the West or NATO and Russia. That’s a totally wrong framing, totally wrong understanding of this war, which is basically common from Russia, which has common from this Putin, Putin’s way to explain the reasons for this war. So in reality, this is a war between Russia and Ukraine. And Ukraine is a victim in this war. Ukraine is the country which was invaded by Russia and which is defending itself for years against one of the most developed military powers in the world. And I mean, if you will try to understand the situation from this point of view, the place of the left, the place of all people who believe in liberation struggles and struggles against oppression, colonialism for the self-determination. So the choice for these people within this view will be obvious.

So definitely you should support Ukraine absolutely the same way as you support whatever Vietnam like decades ago or Palestine and their right for the self-determination. So there is no any significant difference between those cases. And the problem started exactly in the moment when you are starting to deny the imperialist nature of Putin’s Russia where you started to deny the agency of Ukraine in this war and started to buy all these explanations coming from Putin and his supporters in the West. And I think that for the West and left is also a good check of their own understanding of this war would be to compare it with the explanations coming from the far right from United States, for example. Because now you have most of the prominent pro-Trump, far right influencers and politicians who basically provide absolutely the same explanations of this war. And I mean you should really question yourself, do you want to be on the side of whatever Alex Jones or JD Vance? So you are building a sort of united front with them, or you have your own values, you have your own views, and you have your own political tradition, your own political tradition based on the such things as the right for the self-determination, as the global justice as the right to defend yourself against imperialist oppression of all source.

Ksenia Kagarlitskaya:

I just wanted to totally agree because a few days ago I’ve heard the statement of Netanyahu where he explained why do they need that aggression? And you just can’t change the world Palestine to Ukraine and Israel to Russia and you will never guess Who speaks the choice of words is totally the same. I was surprised. I thought it could be something similar, but I didn’t realize how, and I would add it should definitely support political prisoners. There are really many ways to do it First and the most important one is to write letters. And this is possible even if you live not in Russia and you have other cards, not Russian cards, there is a website called Prison mail where you can write letters to all the political prisoners. You just need to use rational language. But it’s totally possible with ChatGPT or any other translation or people.

So you can make those conversation with political prisoners. And this is really important for both sides because for the political prisoner it’s support. He understands that he’s not alone, he’s not forgotten. For the administration of the exact colony is the sign that they could not do anything bad with this political prisoner because he’s being watched. And for yourself it’s really important because you feel that you communicate with a new person with their own world, you can find a new friend during this conversation. So it is a good thing. And also it’s really important to donate all of human organizations together. We do not collect money needed to cover all the costs at the moment. The costs are somewhere about seven to 10 million years per year. We altogether we do not have this money, so please support political prisoners with donations, with letters, just posts about political prisoners. That would also be really important. I think this is a good thing to do if you feel exhausted, you don’t know what to do, but you want to change the world, make it a bit better.

Ashley Smith:

Thanks to Ksenia Kagarlitskaya and Ilya Budraitskis for that revealing discussion of Putin’s regime in Russia. It’s imperialist war in Ukraine and prospects for anti-war and working class resistance. To hear about upcoming episodes of solidarity without exception, sign up for the Real News Network newsletter. Don’t miss an episode.