Ekho Moskvi radio station, 09.04.2018

Lev Shlosberg, leader of the Pskov branch of Yabloko, was the guest of the programme “2018” at the Ekho Moskvi radio station. One of the topics discussed was the new US sanctions against Russian oligarchs and officials, as well as a number of companies, including those with state participation. Lev Shlosberg expressed his opinion that in the near future owners and managers of the companies falling under sanctions would try to distance themselves from their corporations, while these companies simply would not be able to exist outside the international market.

Lev Shlosberg:

– These are delusive hopes of many Russian liberals who believed that external factors, both economic in the first place and political in the second turn, would be able to determine the internal development of Russia in terms of checks and balances. Everything turned out exactly the opposite. Sanctions, that incidentally were understandable from the very beginning, hurt economically very painfully. And today’s new US sanctions are a powerful blow to specific economic empires. And now we are waiting for, we will observe an amazing process when Russian oligarchs will sell their companies …

Ksenia Larina:

– We do not have oligarchs.

Lev Shlosberg:

– We have oligarchs. Mr. Deripaska will sell Rusal, Mr. Kostin will leave the VTB [bank], Mr. Miller will leave Gazprom. Otherwise, their companies will be destroyed on the international market. And these companies can not exist without participation on the international market. Therefore, we are expecting tectonic changes. But all these economic changes politically lead to the strengthening of the present Vladimir Putin’s regime, because Putin’s political regime is a unique symbiosis of a besieged fortress and the Stockholm syndrome. And all these attempts to pressure the besieged fortress only confirm for voters who remain voters, that the garrison’s chief is the only hope and savior.

And the voters can not learn the fact that the garrison chief is the author of the whole catastrophe even from the Ekho Moskvi broadcasts, because Ekho Moskvi can not explain this to tens of millions of voters, it can talk about this with several million people, that is incommensurable with the power of state propaganda. Therefore, I can tell you that beyond the framework of the Russian political system there are no institutions, including international ones, that could push Russia’s political institutions towards democracy and influence the state of these institutions, and we have to live with this. This must be understood. We should not wait for freedom from Europe. Freedom is a product of domestic manufacture. Either it will be born and built here in the end, or it will not be here.

You can listen to the complete broadcast in Russian here