Speech at the Anti-war conference of the Free Russia Forum in Vilnius on March 5, 2022
1. The Russian opposition must do everything to speak with one voice. It is necessary to clearly identify the markers of assistance to the civilian population of Ukraine, to develop a support program. It is necessary for our media forces to organize “propaganda” of assistance to Ukraine. We can do it, the Russian diaspora is very large all over the world.
2. On the part of the Russian diaspora, which does not support Putin’s banditry, it is necessary to work with the front-line states including the Baltic countries and Poland.
3. There are a lot of people among us who have good IT skills. It is necessary to create a pool of such specialists who could break through the information blockade in Russia, concentrating their efforts on those who do not want to know the truth. Those who enjoy their comfort zone and think that the Russian government is not lying to them.
4. Those of us with medical skills could organize a program to help refugees and volunteers.
5. Until now, Russian oil and gas go to the West, and the regime receives money for them. People like the current Russian dictatorship only understand the language of force. They respect only strength, only those who are willing to suffer, only those who are willing to take risks. Very serious pressure must be exerted to stop buying energy from Russia. These measures can be discussed much earlier than, say, closing the airspace or military intervention.
6. In 1948, Stalin could not strangle West Berlin, because every seven minutes a plane with supplies for the city landed at the Tempelhof airfield. If at least cargo planes of NATO countries are in the Ukrainian sky, then this could become a kind of the equivalent of a no-fly zone.
7. Any person with a Russian passport, unfortunately, for many years will very often face the situation that the Germans faced after the Second World War, when their language, their cultural identification became a black mark for them. This will take some getting used to, but it means the need for a lot of national work to change ourselves. If we do not perish in the fires of the third world war, then we will need to actually establish the Russian state anew, if it survives. And in this sense, the conscious people of Russia today should start creating a plan, a blueprint of what can be done with Russia. We need to work on this now. Such regimes fall from some nonsense in one day. At this point, we all need to be ready.