Press release, 17.07.2017

In less than a month Yabloko has collected about 50,000 signatures as part of Grigory Yavlinsky’s Time to Return Home campaign aimed at Russia’s withdrawal from military conflicts and allotment of federal budget funds to Russia’s domestic development.

The campaign started in Ryazan on 19 June. On the whole, signature collection takes place in the central streets and squares of 50 cities in 40 regions of the country – from St. Petersburg to Khabarovsk. During the pickets party activists tell local residents which way the money that has already been spent on the military operation in Syria could have been used to develop the cities where they live.

We assume that every week of Russia’s participation in the military campaign in Syria costs over a billion roubles. Direct military expenses for the war totaled over 100 billion roubles. This money could have sufficed to build 400 kindergartens, cure 360 cancer patients, raise the state universities financing and increase child benefit. Launching one Kalibr cruise missile costs 85 million roubles. This could have sufficed for an average salary of 2,500 teachers and nearly 2,000 doctors.

In October 2015 the RBC news agency estimated the daily cost of Russia’s participation in the Syrian war at no less than 2,5 million dollars while the cost of the military campaign from September 2015 to September 2016 totaled at least 58 billion roubles.

It is worth noting that up to 40 per cent of passers-by in the streets of Russian cities, who communicate with Yabloko’s activists, approve of the campaign demands and most of them put their signatures to support it.

The data correlates with the research of the state-backed pollster VTsIOM. Thus, in April 34 per cent of Russians supported withdrawal of Russia’s military operations in Syria. The number increased by 9 per cent in comparison with the results of a poll conducted by Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) last year. It says that 27 per cent of respondents agreed that the government pays too much attention to foreign policy forgetting which country they govern.

Yabloko also collects signatures via the party website. As a results, we plan to gain support of 100,000 Russian citizens.

“A large number of people in Russia feel that nobody or nearly nobody shares their stance or their point of view. And when they learn that the number is not two, five or seven per cent but every third person in the country feels the same way, they will forget their fear. In this case the voter turnout may boost, and there may emerge prerequisites for not only electing a new nation’s chief executive but changing the political priorities. We collect these signatures not for the president and the government. It is high time we address each other is one nation,” Yabloko Deputy Chair Alexander Gnezdilov explained on air of the Alternativa programme.

The Time to Return home is part of Grigory Yavlinsky’s presidential campaign of 2018.

The campaign sparked an aggressive backlash on behalf of local authorities in some regions of Russia. The administration in Saratov and Tambov prohibited Yabloko’s anti-war pickets. The grounds for the prohibitions seem absurd from the legal point of view. The Tambov city hall prohibited to carry out Grigory Yavlinsky’s anti-war campaign during “the election period” since holding such events “violates the equality of candidates”. First the Saratov City Hall authorised the picket but then forced the activists to stop it using police force. The stated reason was that Saratov’s bombers stroke Syria.

Later the administration of Novosibirsk made an attempt to stop the campaign. A city hall official Polyansky called Yabloko’s activists “the accomplices of the Islamic State” and promised that the Federal Security Service will “see about” them. But after the story leeks to mass media the city hall had to authorise the pickets.

Last week the administrations of Yekaterniburg, Kazan and some other cities decided to use an old method – the places where Yabloko planned to hold pickets suddenly turned out to be unavailable. So, the party activists had to choose some other less favourable spots.

These days the campaign will start in Moscow and St. Petersburg and last until the end of August.