Putin's power is rooted in manipulation and use of force, Kremlin critic Ilya Yashin tells Euronews

euronews (in English)

Kremlin opponent Ilya Yashin, who was recently released in a massive prisoner exchange, spoke to Euronews about his time in Russian prison and told us what will bring Putin down.

Transcript

00:00Russian opposition activist Ilya Yashin was released on the 1st of August after two and

00:05a half years in a Russian prison as part of the historic prisoner exchange. He spoke to

00:10Euronews in Berlin about Russia and his time behind bars.

00:14It is very important not to fall into an emotional pit. It is very important to keep yourself

00:19in an emotional and physical state. Otherwise, you will fall apart. Besides, two years is

00:25not a critical period. It is said that such irreversible changes start to occur after

00:30three years behind bars. After that, people start to have serious health problems, teeth

00:36start to fall out, hair starts to fall out.

00:40In prison, you somehow continued to do YouTube. How did you do it? Is there no control

00:46to prevent it?

00:48Well, you have the opportunity to communicate with people and sometimes censorship allows

00:54some things. Of course, there were moments when my texts were blocked or something was

00:59crossed out or crossed out. But still, when there is a huge amount of letters, and I had

01:04a huge amount of letters, I received more than 30,000 open letters in two years.

01:09Censors could not cope and often some things happened. Thanks to this, I was able to

01:14inform some information, public information, that I wanted to publish in my social media

01:21or asked my team to turn it into some kind of video content on YouTube.

01:30What is Putin's support now?

01:32I think that the hard ideological support of people who are ready to follow Putin

01:37to the end is not so big. There are about the same number of hard supporters of Putin

01:43as there are hard opponents of Putin.

01:47Basically, Russian society consists of people who take an expectant position.

01:52The economic situation and the social situation in Russian society are deteriorating.

01:57And people, as it seems to me, are more and more comparing it with Putin's policy.

02:03By the way, the protest of Prigozhin in the summer of last year was very indicative.

02:08Despite Putin's hysterical reaction, despite what seemed to be a revolt,

02:16a rebellion, the society reacted quite indifferently.

02:21There were no rallies in support of Putin.

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