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'Rage Is Brewing': Navalny Warns Of Public Anger Over Russia's COVID-19 Response
Russian activist Aleksei Navalny.
The Kremlin's COVID numbers, appalling as they are, are manipulated. The situation is far more dire than the regime will admit.
Russian activist Aleksei Navalny.
5/21/20
Russian citizens are expressing greater protest sentiment as the spread of the coronavirus and the state’s fight against it has left many people dissatisfied, including doctors and small-business owners, said one of the nation’s most influential opposition activists. "Right now the degree of protest activity among citizens is probably one of the highest in recent times,” Aleksei Navalny, the founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, said in a video interview with RFE/RL from his Moscow home on May 20. "Such rage is brewing now among those that earlier were not visible in protest activity or direct politics. These are doctors, representatives of small business, and ordinary people that are now without an income," he said. Russia has been hit hard by the coronavirus, with more than 300,000 registered cases, the second-highest globally after the United States. The virus has put huge pressure on the nation’s underfunded health-care system, with dozens of doctors dying from COVID-19 and some taking their own lives.
Moreover, small-business owners are being pushed to the brink of bankruptcy amid the resulting lockdown, while some of the growing number of unemployed people are facing a cash crunch. Yet the government has been slow to tap the more than $160 billion it has meticulously saved up over the years in a rainy-day fund. "No mechanisms of control exist at all. In principle, there is no way to monitor the results," Navalny told RFE/RL. He said the growing frustration among the population opens the window for the Communist Party and the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) -- the so-called "loyal" opposition parties that the government tolerates -- to win more votes in September, but said he expects the state to hamper their efforts. The government has already imposed new election-campaign regulations and given the police greater power, he said.
The Kremlin's COVID numbers, appalling as they are, are manipulated. The situation is far more dire than the regime will admit.