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00:00 We can now bring in Stephen Hall, lecturer in Russian and post-Soviet politics.
00:06 Thank you very much for joining us here on France 24.
00:09 We had quite a crowd that gathered outside this church in Moscow and outside the cemetery
00:17 as Alexei Navalny was laid to rest.
00:20 Are you surprised that there have been no arrests reported so far?
00:26 Not really.
00:28 The job generally happens is that the police or security services will pick up people afterwards.
00:34 There was a lot of media attention, primarily from the Western media and also Russian opposition
00:39 channels on Navalny's funeral.
00:47 As you do it, they won't pick them up as it were live on television.
00:52 They will wait until afterwards.
00:54 Where does his death leave Russia's opposition?
00:58 Well, that's a difficult question to answer.
01:03 Navalny was the leader of the Russian opposition.
01:06 Many of the other opposition politicians are either in exile or in jail.
01:11 There are a few that are still in Russia.
01:13 Yekaterinburg and Tomsk, Boris Nadezhdin possibly as well.
01:18 But he is in Russia, possibly his opposition.
01:23 So it is certainly a difficult time for the Russian opposition.
01:27 And it's going to be very hard for those Russians who are opposed to Putin to be able to find
01:33 a way to unite and show that the majority is opposition to Putin at the current time.
01:42 We had Alexei Navalny's widow, Yulia Navalny, who spoke to EU lawmakers just this week,
01:47 and she called Vladimir Putin a gangster.
01:50 She blamed him for Alexei Navalny's death.
01:54 Something she said that was interesting, she told EU lawmakers that to take on Vladimir
01:57 Putin you can't do the regular route of sanctions.
02:00 You need to be innovative.
02:03 How does one challenge Vladimir Putin, really?
02:09 This is the difficulty, certainly.
02:11 Putin has consolidated power.
02:13 He is a hegemonic authoritarian, a person in a personist autocracy of his own making.
02:19 And you can go after assets for his inner circle in the West if they are still there.
02:27 And by all accounts, they are.
02:29 You can go after the elites who are living in the West, but criticizing the West whenever
02:33 they feel necessary.
02:35 That is one approach.
02:36 But Stephen Hall, I just want to jump in there, because when the war, when Russia's invasion
02:42 began, we had the EU, the United States, who swung into action and started obviously sanctioning
02:49 a lot of Vladimir Putin's inner circle, because they thought that you get to the inner circle,
02:53 you will get to Vladimir Putin.
02:55 They haven't succeeded in getting to Vladimir Putin, have they?
03:03 To an extent, they haven't been able to get to Vladimir Putin.
03:06 But the sanctions have been, whilst they have been fairly extensive, they haven't targeted
03:12 the individuals that are necessary.
03:14 And there is also...
03:16 Like who?
03:17 I was trying to get to.
03:21 Who have they not targeted?
03:24 Well, in terms of what has been able to get people, Russia has been able to get around
03:29 the sanctions fairly easily.
03:31 Sanctions are a blunt tool and therefore they will take time to have an effect.
03:36 And certainly there is more that can be, that needs to be done.
03:39 The simple fact that some members of the elite, some companies haven't been targeted.
03:44 The fact that the elites, as I was trying to say, are able to travel to London, to Paris,
03:49 to Berlin.
03:51 This should also be stopped.
03:52 And it's not just about the elites.
03:54 What the West needs to do, and the European Commission has been quite clear about this,
03:58 is to try and split Russian society away from supporting Putin.
04:03 It also needs to be that Russians should be shown that they are not to be blamed in the
04:08 same way that Putin is for this war.
04:10 There is so much more that needs to be done in supporting the Russian opposition in exile,
04:15 in supporting Russian media in exile, to try and produce an atmosphere that can show that
04:23 Russians are not alone in this situation.
04:26 Now, of course, we have the election that's going to be taking place in two weeks' time.
04:31 Vladimir Putin obviously expected to secure that vote.
04:35 No surprises there.
04:36 But let's talk about the state of Russia's economy, because we've had, as we've said,
04:41 the sanctions that have been in effect for over two years now.
04:44 It was expected to deal a blow to Russia's economy.
04:48 It hasn't.
04:49 We obviously had the U.S. President Joe Biden, who said that the sanctions would reduce the
04:56 ruble to rubble.
04:58 That has not happened either.
04:59 So Vladimir Putin is running with an economy that is growing, despite everything.
05:06 He is running with, he is certainly running with an economy that is growing.
05:10 The sanctions haven't been as effective as I think the West was hoping.
05:14 Russia's economy is much bigger than was, you know, other countries that have been sanctioned
05:19 in the past.
05:20 So it was always going to be tough.
05:22 More importantly, I think the Russian economy is overheating.
05:26 It is based on a war economy at the moment.
05:29 Putin is in a difficult situation.
05:33 He has to justify continuing the war because of what has happened so far in the number
05:38 of people or men, I should say, who have been killed.
05:41 So he needs to maintain the war economy.
05:43 At the same time, he also needs to maintain the living standards that Russians are experiencing.
05:49 That's very hard to do at the moment.
05:51 And as I say, the economy is overheating.
05:53 Now, it all depends on what can happen in terms of what the future will hold.
05:59 But I think that with more pressure, certainly the economy can be made to overheat and it
06:05 will become increasingly difficult for the Kremlin to maintain the cost of the land,
06:10 standards of living for the Russian population.
06:12 And this may lead to further protests.
06:15 Now we have the war in Ukraine that continues.
06:19 Vladimir Putin, of course, pouring in all the resources and manpower necessary.
06:24 And we've seen recent gains on the battlefield.
06:27 Of course, we've had a deep cut, which the Russians claim to have taken.
06:32 We have Ukrainian officials who are admitting that the situation on the battlefield is,
06:37 in fact, quite difficult and dangerous.
06:41 It seems that Vladimir Putin is willing to do whatever it can.
06:45 And Ukraine is outgunned and outnumbered on the battlefield.
06:50 Well, I mean, Vladimir Putin was quite clear from the very beginning in terms of even before
06:58 the full scale invasion by Russia in 2022, that Putin saw Ukraine as an existential issue.
07:07 He saw Ukraine as effectively a part of Russia.
07:10 He was willing to die on the hill that is Ukraine.
07:12 The West hasn't been.
07:14 And the simple fact is that the West has said, should have come up with a better slogan than
07:19 we will support Ukraine for as long as it takes, because that slogan is meaningless.
07:24 What it should have been is we will support Ukraine to win this war as quickly as possible.
07:29 And the West needs to be doing a lot more in terms of supporting Ukraine, because it
07:34 is going to be an issue if Ukraine does collapse, if Ukraine is subsumed into Russia or if Putin
07:42 is able to spin that he has beaten NATO, as increasingly may be the case, that's going
07:49 to be existentially problematic for the West.
07:51 But Sivan, what more should the West be doing?
07:54 Should the West, as Emmanuel Macron suggested, be sending boots on the ground?
08:00 Because we've had all these slogans, we'll support Ukraine for as long as it takes.
08:05 One of the things that this war has shown was that NATO was united.
08:09 But then Emmanuel Macron makes a statement like that and it shows how divided all the
08:13 countries are.
08:15 It does show, and we're talking about the West as in one entity, the collective West
08:20 is multiple states.
08:23 Macron's statement about putting boots on the ground has been attacked by a number of
08:29 states, although the Baltics and I believe Netherlands have actually said that they would
08:33 do that if necessary.
08:36 What I'm saying is you don't need to necessarily put soldiers on the ground.
08:39 It's not going to try and, trying to de-escalate as it were, NATO does not need to get involved
08:44 as such, but the West needs to start telling its electorate that we are effectively at
08:52 war.
08:53 We need to put ourselves into a war economy and start building up the reserves, not only
08:58 for themselves, but also for Ukraine.
09:00 They are far behind now from Russia.
09:03 Putin alluded to it in his state of the address to Russia yesterday, that Russia is on, in
09:11 terms of factories, they're on three shifts, building with munitions and drones and various
09:16 other pieces necessary, obviously, for fighting the war.
09:19 The West is way behind on this and Ukraine is not self-sufficient in terms of munitions
09:26 and the West needs to maintain and increase its support as much as it can in the coming
09:31 months.
09:32 We'll see how that support continues, Stephen Hall.
09:34 We're going to have to leave it there.
09:35 Thank you very much for joining us on the programme today.
09:36 Thank you.
09:36 Thank you.