What really happened
behind this fence may never be known.
Alexei Navalny, Russia's most
vocal Kremlin critic and best-known
opposition politician,
died in the "Polar Wolf " prison camp,
sixty kilometers
north of the Arctic Circle.
Now that Navalny’s dead,
Vladimir Putin no longer faces
any meaningful
political opposition in Russia.
Putin's been in power for twenty-four years.
We’ve worked hard and achieved a lot.
Many of Putin’s critics are dead, behind bars or in exile
like Dmitry Gudkov.
Does Navalny's death mean the end of the Russian opposition?
We ask a one-time Duma deputy,
now one of the Kremlin's fiercest critics:
We should be more angry.
We should have more rage
to fight against this corrupt
and criminal regime.
Because we have no choice.
The regime when it kills its opponent…
it means that the regime
is too weak.
Navalny's wife Yulia
has made the surprise announcement
that she will continue her
husband’s work from exile.
In a speech in the EU Parliament,
she attacked President Putin
personally and blamed him
for her husband's death.
You are not dealing
with a politician, but with
a bloody monster.
Yulia is a clever,
charismatic and strong woman.
Perhaps that's exactly what
Russia needs now to structure
the opposition:
Female voices of protest.
It won't be easy.
Mourners from all over Russia
risked arrest to pay their last
respects to Navalny.
President Putin is very popular
with most Russians: the Russian
economy has not collapsed
despite Western sanctions.
Moscow’s metropolis sparkles
as if the war had never happened.
We’re enabling the stable
development of our society and
the prosperity of our citizens.
But once you leave the metropolis,
the sparkle vanishes.
In many places, Russia's infrastructure
is dilapidated,
dating back to Soviet times.
This winter, pipes burst
in several large cities
leaving thousands of
Russians freezing in their homes.
We're sitting here without heating
and don't know what to do next.
The children haven't had
a hot meal for ages.
There’s scalding hot water everywhere.
You can’t get past.
The health-center patients
can't get through.
Some have already burnt their feet.
But these days hardly anyone dares
to openly voice their grievances
let alone to publicly protest
against Putin's war in Ukraine.
Most people choose not
risk a ten year prison sentence
n
on grounds of
"discrediting the military”.
And many believe Putin's propaganda.
He claims that in the so-called
special military operation, Russia
is defending its
independence against NATO.
The most important thing uniting
us is the fate of our country and
our deep understanding of
this crucial milestone in Russian
history and of the great goals
that our society is striving for.
Despite the mobilization of young men,
and the fallen soldiers, many
Russians are still behind
Moscow's war plans.
The majority is behind Putin.
Eighty per cent support his plans.
But there are still
twenty percent who disagree.
That would be twenty million,
or even more, who oppose the war.
Like these women.
Determined to retrieve their men
from the front, they’ve been
demonstrating for several weeks
in front of Red Square, laying flowers
at the grave of the unknown soldier.
– Not as a ritual, but in protest.
It’s war.
People are dying.
Simple civilians.
Men who were called up
as part of the mobilization.
We can’t pretend that
they’re not dying there.
And this winter they queued
for hours in the cold to cast
their vote for the only
presidential candidate to publicly
criticize the war
- Boris Nadezhdin.
He needed at least 100,000
signatures to get on the ballot.
He got even more, but was disqualified:
the election commission
claimed there were
“irregularities” in the signatures.
All other candidates are
considered loyal to the Kremlin,
some are completely unknown
to the voters,
and that is exactly what President
Putin is counting on,
says opposition politician Gudkov:
He can be very strong in
comparison with like no-names.
But, in case
of like a real competition, I think
that Putin would lose.
But real competition is non-existent.
And for many, any dreams of reform
have died with Alexei Navalny.