Press Release, 18.03.2021

Photo: The centre  of Homs, Syria. Photo by gsafarek / Depositphotos.com

Alexander Gnezdilov, a member of the Federal Political Committee of the Yabloko party, gave a comment to the oldest Czech newspaper Lidove Noviny. The publication was dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the civil war in Syria. In 2015, by the decision of Vladimir Putin, Russia entered this war on the side of the regime of the Bashar al-Assad family ruling the country since 1970.

Alexander Gnezdilov stressed that “billions of roubles were wasted on war, instead of investing in overcoming poverty in Russia, improving health care and raising people’s living standards”. It should be noted that according to Yabloko’s estimates, as of March 2018, Russia’s participation in the war cost the state at least 172.3 billion roubles for the first 2.5 years.

In the summer of 2017, the Yabloko party carried out an anti-war campaign “Time to Return Home”, collecting over 107,000 signatures in 50 cities of Russia against participation in the Syrian war. According to the poll of the Levada Centre, independent non-governmental centre for public opinion studies, already in August 2017, the number of Russians calling for the withdrawal of troops from Syria increased from 34 per cent to 49 per cent.

Answering the question about the significance of the war in Syria for the rating of President Putin, Alexander Gnezdilov noted that “the war in Syria helped Vladimir Putin to divert public attention from Russia’s domestic problems. Syria and Ukraine allowed the state propaganda to oust social and economic discussions out of the public domain [replacing them by the discussions of the wars]. But after the pension reform [which rose the pension age and deprived people of part of their earned pensions], the war in Syria could not cope with this task any more.”