Natalia Arno is one of the main activists against the Vladimir Putin regime. She lives in exile, coordinating the internal resistance and helping the dissidence that chooses to flee Russia. She suspects that the FSB tried to poison her in mid-May in Prague or Berlin, where she suffered obvious signs of poisoning. There is an investigation underway and yesterday afternoon, during this interview held in a hotel in Madrid, she was protected by several agents.
Do you think the West tolerated Putin too much before the invasion of Ukraine?
Definitely. No one in the West believed us when we said that he presided over a corrupt and criminal regime. We had spent many years denouncing their brutality, but neither Europe nor the United States paid attention. They thought they could control it and, at the same time, do business with it.
not enough was known
Even today I don’t think the West knows the nature of the regime well, starting with the low value it places on human life.
How do you find out what is really happening in Russia?
We have a wide network of collaborators. Tens of thousands of Russians are fighting from within to overthrow Putin. They form a fifth column.
As?
Its main task is to publicize what is happening in Ukraine and expose the corruption and criminality of the Kremlin. They let you know, for example, if there are going to be recruitments in your area. They steal internet addresses (VPNs) that they use to access information published outside of Russia. Then they print it out and leave it in the letterboxes of the apartment blocks. It is something that the dissidence already did during the Soviet Union.
You no longer see the demonstrations of a few years ago
It’s too dangerous. You can be sentenced to 15 years in jail for any anti-war comments. But the dissidence works underground. Not surprisingly, Russia is the second country in the world with the most VPN thefts. This is how the anti-Putin Russians spread the truth.
The regime seems strong.
Any authoritarian regime seems strong until the very day it collapses. Putin’s is a monster with feet of clay. All autocracies end up falling. It’s a matter of time.
Aren’t you afraid that if Putin falls, chaos will unleash?
It is possible, but we prepare for it not to happen. We are change agents. Western governments help us prepare for the transition when the time comes
Do you think that democracy can take root in Russia after so many centuries of absolutism and authoritarianism?
Clear. We are not doomed to unscrupulous dictators. It is true that Russia does not have a democratic tradition, but neither did its satellites, countries that today are in NATO and the EU, and neither did, for example, South Korea in the 1950s. History has its weight, but this does not imply that Russia cannot be a rule of law.
It was on its way at the turn of the century.
The 2003 elections were the last clean and democratic ones. But even after that year the critical media remained. There was also economic competition. It could have been built from there. But for that, the West would have had to be stricter with Putin. If in 2008, after the invasion of Georgia, he had punished him as he has done now, he might not have occupied part of Ukraine in 2014.
Do you see a risk of civil war?
If there is a civil uprising it will be from within, from the base, at the local level. There is a lot of resistance in the municipalities, especially in the poorest and most marginalized regions. I come from one of them, Buryatia, in Siberia. We have suffered xenophobia and the yoke of Moscow. The Kremlin is doing in Ukraine what it has done to us before, denying our identity. The regions are Putin’s Achilles heel. He’ll see.
