With the death of Alexei Navalny, I called Ilya Zaslavsky, A Russian anti-Putin activist, and asked him to come on the show to give some perspective on what happened and its ramifications.
This show was a quick turnaround, so I apologize for the editing. I wanted to get it out to you as soon as possible.
Also, a quick heads-up: FeedSpot just ranked One CA Podcast as one of their top 20 foreign policy podcasts. Check it out at:
https://podcasts.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/
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One CA is a product of the civil affairs association
and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.
We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail dot com
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
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Special thanks to the PilSkills Cheftain Channel for creating 11 hours of hip hop instrumentals for the sample. Found on YouTube at (+/-2:40:00) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgl9ZsT3jKs
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00:00:03 JACK GAINES
Welcome to the 1CA podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. Today, we have a special episode.
00:00:40 JACK GAINES
With the death of Alexei Navalny, I called Ilya Zaslavsky, a D .C.-based anti -Putin activist, and asked him to come on the show to give some perspective on what happened and its ramifications. This show is a quick turnaround. So I apologize for the editing, but I wanted to get it out to you as soon as possible. We've known each other for a couple of years now, right? Correct. And for this call, I just wanted to bring you on because of the whole Navalny announcement that he was killed, and it was right in the middle of the Munich Security Conference. It was right when his wife was about to speak, I believe.
00:01:14 ILYA ZASLAVSKY
Absolutely, yes. She spoke yesterday and she said that maybe it would have been a better choice for her to go to her family, but... She understood that if Alexei was alive, he would be on this stage speaking against Putin. So that's why she did it.
00:01:29 JACK GAINES
Right. Yeah. And so have you been getting prompt a lot since the Navalny? Do you mind if I just call it a Navalny murder? Even though he was in prison, it was timed specifically for this Munich conference and to send a message to the West. Does that bother you if I call it a murder?
00:01:45 ILYA ZASLAVSKY
No, no, no. It is a murder and it should be called a murder. It's a deliberate assassination.
00:01:50 JACK GAINES
Okay. I try not to editorialize too much, but when something like this happens, it's so obvious that you just kind of have to name it. And I thought of you because you get pinged on these things a lot because of your work with anti -corruption and anti -cliptocracy. And I thought this is a great time to reach out and just get your opinion on what's going on and also talk about how this demonstrates how cliptocracy becomes an ongoing national security threat. Absolutely, it does.
00:02:17 ILYA ZASLAVSKY
And this grave concern has been going on since the beginning of Russian war against Ukraine in 2014, for others much earlier, since actually Putin's speech at Munich conference, I believe it was like 2007 or something, just before Russia attacked Georgia. And within Russian opposition, both within Russia and outside in the diaspora, there have been lots of divisions and lots of different thoughts. But I would say... There were people who were still hopeful to do changes within Russia. And Navalny was their flagman, was their leader, was their organizer. Many people considered him one of the best people who can unite, especially young people and young professionals. Right. Him and Barbouris Nemtsov. And that's why when Nemtsov was killed. There was so much discouragement and tragedy, but people were still hoping that we still got Navalny. And then there was another, I would say, streak of thought and activity that is, especially in the diaspora, where some activists and experts were not hopeful about things within Russia and didn't believe that much can be changed. But they saw a global security. threat coming out of Russia. Sure. Out of Russian corruption and plutocracy. And because they saw it spread in the near broad, that's how Russia used to call former Soviet Union states,
00:03:40 JACK GAINES
of Russian corruption and plutocracy.
00:03:49 ILYA ZASLAVSKY
but also in Eastern Europe, in Western Europe, and then in Africa, Southern America, and then in the West, in US, in Canada, in Japan, among G7 and NATO allies. And I belong to the second camp. I don't suggest that they are mutually incompatible, but I never believe that we can actually stop Putin's regime anytime soon. But I always warned since at least 2012 that this is absolutely unprecedented kleptocratic regime. It's worse than Soviet regime in some aspects. And the West is partly complacent in giving resources,
00:04:29 JACK GAINES
resources, money. You're talking about banking. especially intermediaries that help with hiding banking and buying commodities and just feeding this regime allowing it to trade globally in the way that it wants rather than forcing them to trade on the western governance standards and that this will have grave security implications this will this is not something happening in distant russia you know with poor russian people and i sympathize i'm not make sarcasm here but
00:04:30 ILYA ZASLAVSKY
money. You're talking about
00:04:36 ILYA ZASLAVSKY
and just feeding this regime allowing it to trade globally in the way that it wants rather than forcing them to trade on the western governance standards and that this will have grave security implications this will this is not something happening in distant russia you know with poor russian people and i sympathize i'm not make sarcasm here but It will not stay contained within Russia. So this is not some distant story. We in the West will pay a price. In 2012, it sounded freaky and then alarmist. After 2014, it gradually became, the acknowledgement sort of grew. But it still took years and years. And only full -scale attack on Ukraine actually made it mainstream. And now NATO is talking about long -term conflict with Russia. which Russia is forcing on NATO. And everyone is talking finally about defense spending and collective action and containment. So to bring this back to Navalny, Navalny showed the actual magnitude of this corruption. Someone calculated overall, he and his team, around 100 major investigations. And I mean, it depends how one counts, but... I think if you include all the small and little regional investigations and various findings they did on individuals, it will be much more. Like this investigation of Putin palaces and yachts, but also... That's right.
00:06:08 JACK GAINES
That's right. I remember that, the ones that were off the Black Sea, right?
00:06:11 ILYA ZASLAVSKY
Yes, and it had millions of views. But what he showed isn't just the fancy and the scary part of corruption. What he showed is the systemic nature of it. And if we're talking about systemic nature, it is not contained within Russia. It is global. They're using global financial system and using lots of various partners, allies, and enablers, including in the West, to carry out what they do. And so that's the legacy of Navalny. For me, he not just mobilized people who wanted to do changes within Russia, but he also showed the international experts applications of This grant corruption for the rest of the world.
00:06:53 JACK GAINES
Then obviously Putin took him seriously because he went after him when he was living overseas and then he captured him when he was in the country. So does that mean that Putin is influenced or his government is influenced by the diaspora and how they think about Russia?
00:07:08 ILYA ZASLAVSKY
It's a great question. To be honest,
00:07:09 JACK GAINES
question. To
00:07:10 ILYA ZASLAVSKY
be honest, I'll be brief about this. I think Putin tolerated Navalny and actually tried to exploit his existence for his own political needs at the time. And his expediency and his needs fluctuated over time and changed significantly over time. I think he always hated the West and the U .S. in particular. Yeah, he blamed him for collapsing the Soviet Union. Yes, and he always had this revanchist kind of mind.
00:07:29 JACK GAINES
for collapsing
00:07:35 ILYA ZASLAVSKY
of mind. What we should not forget about him is that his cool nature is that he's a KGB recruiter.
00:07:40 JACK GAINES
a KGB recruiter. Right, so anytime you offer him an opportunity, he'll explore it to see if he can exploit it. or if it's worth cooperating with. But if it's not, then he'll go against it or undermine it.
00:07:53 ILYA ZASLAVSKY
Exactly. He sort of reached the ceiling of globalization. He exploited it to the best of his ability, and then he got disappointed in it, that he couldn't manipulate it further. But while he was still doing it, he was consolidating power within Russia. And I think until maybe 2010, 2012, he was using... Navalny and other investigations from third parties to keep a leash on his own boyah. It's a story ancient as Russian history. Corrupt and tyrant czar keeping at bay his boyahs through third parties and forcing them to fight each other. He basically wanted to have compromise on everyone and some of that compromise to be publicized. But that led some people to... even accuse, you know, Navalny of being a Kremlin's project, which is nonsense, just insane. But I'm sure Navalny was always a genuine activist and a genuine anti -corruption fighter.
00:08:52 JACK GAINES
fighter. He was probably trying to play within the rules at some point to cooperate and still be the opposition. But when he just got to be too dichotic, he just said, that's it. I got to just go all the way with this.
00:09:05 ILYA ZASLAVSKY
Exactly. I share the same opinion. Along that murky and bumpy road, Navalny did a lot of things. He removed all the cases that got in his hands, and he mobilized many young people, and he gave hope to many of them. But then the dire times started. Putin really decided to go full -scale against Ukraine, and I believe that's why he started to eliminate opponents physically. And openly.
00:09:36 JACK GAINES
openly. The chair flying contests out of all the windows in Moscow. Yes, and he did these constitutional amendments, which allowed him to basically stay for life and get reelected as many times as he wanted for rigged elections.
00:09:39 ILYA ZASLAVSKY
Yes, and he did these constitutional amendments, which allowed him to basically stay for life and get reelected as many times as he wanted for rigged elections. I think very few people in Russian opposition or among Western policymakers understood the scale of Putin's intentions. He would actually go at the full scale war with Ukraine, but also with the West. What we're witnessing over the last two years is almost total disentanglement of Russia from Western globalization, from Western economic ties. Something that has been built since even Stalin times. The first gas deals were discussed even in the last years of Stalin and then Khrushchev and Brezhnev. He disentangled all of that, even like the most sacred to some of his KGB colleagues and party bosses. So he was preparing for many years for this attack. And Navalny was one of the people who meddled with this policy. And he had to be either squeezed out of the country or eliminated within the country. So they tried to poison him. And then when he returned back to Russia, not receiving the signal to shut up and to stay abroad, they immediately jailed him and they started to isolate him. And they still couldn't manage to do that. because Navalny managed to be vocal even from the prison. So what happened over the last half a year is a clear preparation for the murder because they moved him around the country and eventually put him in this very distant northern region where no one can reach it. They opened criminal cases on his lawyers. So they squeezed two out of his five lawyers out of the country and the three others are now in prison. And he got new lawyers. So he kept on kind of being resurgent in his protest and in his activism. So yeah, they decided to kill him. In any case, it was deliberate and it couldn't have been done without the protest direct order. And you know,
00:11:45 JACK GAINES
there's two things that come to mind. One, a friend of mine who is very familiar with Russia told me a story. He said, when you get to the point where you feel like you can't win, it's like you live in a neighborhood and you really hate the guy next door. And so you start talking to people who are arsonists and you just start passing out matches and say, just go burn something, just go burn something, whatever, just go burn stuff. And you may burn down your own house, but eventually they're going to burn down that guy's house and you'll be happy. And that's kind of the mindset is if I'm going down, everyone's burning down. And so, which is a very dire view of current conditions. But to me, it shows the willingness to take that risk of losing his money. He's willing to do that because he'd rather take new money out of Russia. He'll take more money out of the foreign campaigns where Wagner and other groups are running mines in Africa. He can get more money. He doesn't worry about the money. It's the power and the position that he worries about. The second thing that gets me is I don't see a transition plan.
00:12:11 ILYA ZASLAVSKY
that's kind
00:12:40 JACK GAINES
I don't see a transition plan. So he doesn't care. Once he passe