The Putin regime has plunged Russia into filth and disgrace. Having trampled the Constitution, the laws, and the rights of citizens, it has unleashed an aggressive, predatory, base, criminal war. Neither Ukraine nor NATO attacked or had any intention of attacking Russia. The sole cause of the war is the maniacal obsession of Russia’s rulers — the thirst for boundless expansion of their power. They are waging war to establish a ‘right’ to dictate their will to other peoples.
By attacking Ukraine, the Kremlin kleptocracy has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. Ukrainian defenders of their country and civilians, including more than five hundred children. But Russians too — turned by the Kremlin into invaders and occupiers, who met their inglorious end in Ukraine — were killed by those who sent them there.
The Putin regime has brought back to Europe the bloodshed, the suffering, and the grief that Europe had not known since Hitler’s time. The Putin regime is, precisely, the regime of a new Hitler. Its ideology, which many call rashism[1], is a variety of Nazi ideology adapted to the conditions of the post-industrial era.
This ideology denies the agency of individuals and peoples, their equality in rights, democracy, the primacy of human rights, and the rule of law as such. It rests on a purely Nazi conception of the exceptionalism of a so-called ‘Russian civilisation’ and its superiority over the ‘Western world’. The purely Nazi character of the Putin regime is shown by its declaration of Ukrainians as a defective ‘sub-people’ and by the setting of the task of forcibly changing their national and cultural identity.
Like the Hitler regime, Putin’s Nazi regime seeks to overturn the legal and moral limits on violence and cruelty that humanity has worked out — to install the ‘law of the jungle’, in which force is licensed to do anything. It destroys the international order that secures stability and safety; it casts the world back into archaism and savagery. It carries the same global threat to civilisation as the Hitler regime carried.
Today Ukraine has become the field of a global battle between civilisation and barbarism, between freedom and tyranny. This is a war over the future world order, over a way of life, over values. This is an existential war in which on one side stand those convinced that one may attack neighbours, subjugate them, plunder them, kill them, and dismember them. And on the other side stand those who hold that this must not be done — that what isn’t yours is not yours to take. Between them no compromise is possible.
We are citizens of Russia who stand for a world where what isn’t yours is not yours to take. Where individuals and peoples are equal in rights and can live without ‘masters’, whether their own or others’. Where they freely choose both their leaders and their friends and allies. To this end we hold the following to be necessary:
1. The unconditional restoration of Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders of 2013. Russia’s unconditional renunciation of any attempts whatsoever to dictate Ukraine’s foreign, defence, or domestic policy. Including in matters of language and culture.
2. Compensation by Russia to Ukraine for the damage inflicted in the course of the war, the amount to be determined by a representative international conference.
3. The handover to international tribunal of the present military and political leadership of the Russian Federation, headed by Putin, for the commission of ‘crimes against peace’ — the unleashing and waging of an aggressive war in Ukraine.
4. The denuclearisation of Russia (the elimination of its nuclear arsenal). The systematic blackmail with a first nuclear strike on the part of high-ranking representatives of the Putin regime (including Putin himself) must not go without consequences.
5. The de-verticalisation and de-imperialisation of Russia[2]. Its re-establishment as a voluntary confederation of the territories that compose it, retaining the right to leave that confederation. A radical redistribution of authority from the executive organs of state power to the representative organs at every level.
This can be achieved only by inflicting a military defeat on the Putin regime and overthrowing it. We categorically reject attempts to ‘freeze the conflict’ in its present state. That would only legitimise aggression and annexation as means of achieving political ends, and would bury for good the international legal order. We reject attempts to find some compromise with the Putin regime that takes account of its ‘concerns’. An aggressor that has violated every international norm and encroached on the future of humanity must receive nothing.
We demand that Western leaders put an end to the policy of avoiding ‘escalation of the conflict’. It only allows Putin to blackmail the West with that very ‘escalation’, hoping to force it into a ‘geopolitical capitulation’. Any international legal order holds only as long as those who violate it are met with collective resistance. As long as its co-founders are prepared to fight for it.
We demand a fundamental expansion of military aid to Ukraine, up to and including the direct participation of NATO troops in combat. Ukraine must receive binding security guarantees right now, not after the war is over.
We urge Western leaders to discard their fears about a possible disintegration of the Russian Federation as a result of the regime’s fall. No ‘painful consequences’ of that will outweigh the danger of preserving an imperial state that would reproduce aggression and revanchism. Either Russia becomes confederal, democratic, and ‘pro-Western’, returning to its European roots — or it must cease to exist as a single entity.
We will welcome the overthrow of the Putin dictatorship, whichever group carries out the overthrow and whatever means it uses. But for us, the replacement of the dictator or of a handful of his closest henchmen is not enough. We stand for a fundamental replacement of the depraved Putinist ‘elites’. They must go, and answer for what they have done — at the very least with the loss of their wealth and their status. Only this will make it possible to dismantle the tyrannical and aggressive system.
We welcome any form of opposition to Putin’s aggression. From simply refusing the regime public support, to refusing army service, to passing intelligence to Ukraine, to joining the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
In the conditions of the bloody slaughter the regime has unleashed in Ukraine, and of its elimination of the last possibilities of legal protest in Russia, we consider it hypocrisy to declare that violence is impermissible in opposition to this regime. While unconditionally recognising Ukraine’s right to armed resistance against the aggressor, we also recognise the right of citizens of the Russian Federation to armed struggle against the Putin dictatorship.
We do not, however, consider that public peaceful protest against the war and the dictatorship has lost its meaning. But no safe ways of expressing dissent remain. All of them may entail repressive consequences of one kind or another. Standing against the absolute evil of putinshchina[3] today demands a readiness to sacrifice well-being, career, freedom, even life. For the sake of our world, in which one must not bomb theatres, hospitals, schools, or apartment blocks. In which what isn’t yours is not yours to take.
We will not reconcile ourselves to Putin’s having destroyed our world. We will fight for its restoration. We do not need a world that has Putin in it. We propose to citizens of the Russian Federation who share our views to consider themselves participants in the Front of Anti-Putin Resistance.
Victory to Ukraine, freedom to Russia!
Alexander Skobov, historian and publicist · Maxim Reznik, politician from Saint Petersburg · Igor Yakovenko, sociologist and journalist · Igor Eidman, sociologist and publicist · Maxim Kuzakhmetov, historian and journalist from Saint Petersburg