There is no one to oppose Putin on the ballot anyway. Russia’s opposition has been decimated, with Navalny’s death last month just the latest devastating blow.
“The political field has been cleared out,” Yekaterina Duntsova, a former regional legislator and journalist who tried running for president this year, told NBC News.
“Fundamentally, the country has changed for the worse in the last six years,” she said in a phone interview from Moscow earlier this month. She was one of two candidates with an anti-war message barred from running against Putin, while three Kremlin-approved candidates will be on the ballot alongside the Russian leader.
“People live in a state of aggression — finding out who is for and who is against, looking for some virtual enemies and the fifth column,” Duntsova said.
Russian elites with anti-war views have been forced into exile, and those remaining in Russia have been kept in check. Independent media fled the country, and any form of protest has become impossible without risking arrest.
History textbooks have been altered to extol the virtues of the war, basic military training is now part of the curriculum for high school seniors, and public spaces are filled with posters summoning Russian men to join the army. The so-called “Western values” of freedom of expression and respect for human rights have been banished, resulting in the outlawing of the LGTBQ+ “movement” and persecution of human rights advocates.
Politically motivated arrests and the detention of foreigners, including Americans, are also becoming routine.
“Russian society is at a point right now where it’s experiencing the largest scale of political repressions — particularly for expressing one’s opinion or exercising one’s rights and freedoms,” said Denis Shedov, a board member for the Memorial Human Rights Defense Center, heir to the human rights group Memorial, which was shut down in Russia in late 2021. “We have not seen the…
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