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Russia's public enemy number 1: Ponomarev calls to arms - is there now a threat of "civil war"?

2022-08-15T19:16:32.867Z


Ilya Ponomarev was the only Duma deputy to vote against the Crimean annexation. Now he is calling on his compatriots to use guns. "There will be sacrifices, but that is the price."


Ilya Ponomarev was the only Duma deputy to vote against the Crimean annexation.

Now he is calling on his compatriots to use guns.

"There will be sacrifices, but that is the price."

Kyiv - Ilya Ponomarev is someone who swims against the tide.

Politics took him from an early age.

From the Siberian homeland of Novosibirsk to the State Duma in Moscow, more than 3000 kilometers away.

In the Russian parliament, Ponomarev appeared as a politician who questions things, criticizes the leadership - and thereby made himself vulnerable.

The Kremlin has already stripped him of his immunity.

In 2014 he was the only member of the Duma to vote against the annexation of Crimea.

The voting result of 445 yes votes and one no vote made Ponomarev known worldwide.

From then on he appeared alongside opposition politician Alexei Navalny as one of the harshest critics of President Vladimir Putin.

The Kremlin treated him accordingly.

Ponomarev first fled to the United States and then to Ukraine.

From there he now regularly comments on the Ukraine war – including calls for violence.

Ukraine war: Ponomarev calls to arms - "There will be victims"

In a post on Facebook, Ponomarev told how he experienced the first days of the war.

He was in Ukraine to "defend the country against Putin's aggression".

And the ex-politician apparently means these statements seriously.

"On the first day of the war, I went to the draft office, joined the TRO, and was given a machine gun." The TRO is the Territorial Defense of Ukraine, a type of volunteer army involved in the Ukraine war.

In the post, Ponomarev called on his Russian compatriots to use guns.

"You should first take up arms and go to war." It's about the "beautiful Russia of the future".

There “we will take only those who took up arms to overthrow Putin's fascist regime,” Ponomarev wrote.

"There will be sacrifices, but that is the price."

Ukraine war: "Putin's system is under pressure like never before"

Ponomarev received support from Kremlin critics such as the US-Ukrainian Igor Sushko.

He has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter, but the vast majority of Russia's 145 million inhabitants do not consume their news via social media, but via television.

Here, the aligned state media set the direction.

Inevitably, the criticism of Ponomarev and other Putin opponents does not reach everyone in the largest country on earth.

But that doesn't mean she can't pose a threat to Putin.

The Moscow sociologist Greg Judin recently spoke in the

taz

of divisions within Russian society.

"Putin's system is under pressure like never before." Is there a risk of escalation?

"I believe that there will be a civil war in Russia: between ultra-reactionary imperial forces that want to take the country back to the 19th century and so-called republican forces, represented by Navalny, for example."

Ukraine war: sociologist speaks of "terror, civil war or revolution"

If criticism of Putin gets louder, things could get uncomfortable for the Kremlin.

"I don't know what form this conflict will take," said the sociologist Yudin.

“Maybe terror, a civil war or a revolution.

Much will depend on how the war against Ukraine ends.”

Militarily, Russia has made little progress recently.

Russian troops had been pushed back from Kyiv and they are making slow progress in the south as well.

The focus is probably on eastern Ukraine.

In the Donbass border region, Russian civil servants negotiated a rapprochement with the self-proclaimed People's Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk on Thursday.

(as)

Source: merkur

All news articles on 2022-08-15

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