Press Release, 28.04.2014

YABLOKO leader Sergei Mitrokhin took part in the Congress of Liberal International – the world organisation of liberals and liberal parties – which was conducted in Rotterdam. Mitrokhin made a report in the round table devoted to the situation in Ukraine.

Most questions raised at the round table evolved around sanctions against Russia.

Ukrainian participants of the discussion, including Ukraine’s Ambassador in the Netherlands Alexander Gorin, spoke in favour of toughening of sanctions against Russia.

YABLOKO leader Sergei Mitrokhin told that sanctions could not be a way out of the present situation for three reasons:

First, European businesses are sharply against sanctions. The West can lose hundreds of thousands of jobs that exist due to the supply of goods to Russia. This means that sanctions are unlikely to be realized.

Second, even if the US and Europe manage to agree upon sanctions, a number of countries, such as, for example, China will not join them.

Third, and the most important, the sanctions will not result in changing Vladimir Putin’s policies. ON the opposite, the authorities will use sanctions for provoking a new round of anti-Western hysteria and suppression of the opposition.

“The best way out is a kind of a Marshall Plan for Ukraine. After the citizens of Russia see that European integration has led to the improvement of life of Ukrainians, they sooner or later will realize that Putin is leading the country to a deadlock, and there is no real alternative to the European way of development in the modern world,” Mitrokhin said.

Sergei Mitrokhin also analysed in his report what had caused such Russia’s policies towards Ukraine and Crimea.

“Vladimir Putin has built for the past 14 years his own system of political domination on this basis, and he is the key and indispensable element in this system. Vladimir Putin connects his perspectives only with the existence of this system and only as its head. Russia’s economic and political elite also does not want Putin’s retreat from power: in this case it may lose all the super profits and wealth accumulated with the help of corruption and at the expense of the rest of the population,” he noted.

According to YABLOKO leader, the fear of an Orange Revolution phantom has been the main driving force in the evolution of the regime since 2004, when the first such revolution occurred in Ukraine. It was followed by the Arab Spring, and now by a new revolution in Ukraine, which is much more radical. Mass rallies in Moscow in 2011-2012 showed that such scenarios are very real for Russia too.

“During all these ten years the Kremlin has been developing a programme of preventive measures that would preempt the regime change. This programme included, in the first place, toughening of reprisals against the opposition, draconian laws against the civil society, curbing of civil rights and freedoms, etc.,” Mitrokhin stressed.

He also added that “this policy came into conflict with the Western vector of development, which Russia, despite all its mistakes and jerks, maintained throughout 1990s. Hence, the regime made a sharp ideological turn towards the anti-Western vector and, respectively, confrontation with the West”.

Mitrokhin pointed out that in such conditions confrontation with the West and the outer world in general had to solve two domestic tasks: first, strengthen the support for that part of the Russian society, which was disappointed by pro-Western and highly inefficient reforms of 1990s; second, basing on the mass-scale patriotic hysteria caused by the confrontation with the “outer enemy” it would be much easier to suppress the pro-Western opposition, which, according to the Kremlin, generates the main threat of the Orange Revolution.

“Ukraine is a battlefield for Vladimir Putin where he wants to destroy not only the new Kyiv authorities, but also the West with its “undermining” Orange Revolution project.

He wants to demonstrate to the world who the real master of the post-Soviet space is, while creating an “imperial PR” for himself in Russia, an image of the “gatherer of the Russian lands”. He openly declares that under his leadership Russia will implement the imperial project of reunion of Russians throughout the whole of the former Soviet territory,” Mitrokhin added.

Summing up, Mitrokhin said that “the “imperial project” can not be long-term, as it is fraught with enormous risks. Putin’s system in general has a very small margin of stability, as it is based on extremely unfair distribution of property and national income. Economy is almost entirely dependent on global raw material prices. Now external challenges associated with illegitimacy of the border are added to these internal sources of instability”.

“Instead of solving its multiple problems, Russia will spend its oil revenues onto new territories, and without any pay-off: a corrupt state is unable to develop even its old lands, not to mention the new ones,” he concluded.

The congress adopted the World Today resolution which raising the most urgent issues debated in different regions of the world. As regards Russia, the Congress called the Russian authorities to ease pressure on civil activists and the opposition, stop reprisals, release YABLOKO activists Maxim Petlin and Evnegy Vitishko from prison, stop persecutions against activists Suren Gazaryan and Prof. Savva, The resolution also contains the demand to investigate murders of journalists, YABLOKO activists and human rights defenders: YABLOKO activists and journalists Larissa Yudina, Yuri Schekochikhin, Farid Babayev, journalist Anna Politkovskaya and human rights activist Natalia Estemirova.

Liberal International congresses represent an opportunity of exchange of opinion and informal contacts with YABLOKO’s sister parties and many of such parties are ruling parties in their countries. During the congress Sergei Mitrokhin had a meeting with Ahmed Aboutaleb, Mayor of Rotterdam. The two politicians exchanged their opinions on the situation with local self-governing in the Netherlands and Russia.

Also Sergei Mitrokhin discussed the situation in Ukraine with Prime Minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte.

The YABLOKO party is member of the key international political liberal organisations and participates in the development of common liberal position on the most important issues of the international policies and facilitates dissemination of objective information on Russia. Since 1998 YABLOKO has been member of Liberal International, the world organisation of liberal parties.