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President Vladimir Putin has yet to formally announce his plans to run for re-election next year, but he may already have a potential challenger, Yekaterina Duntsova, a journalist from the Tver region who announced her candidacy for the presidency last week.
Who is Yekaterina Duntsova?
Yekaterina Duntsova, who wants to run for president of Russia, has said that the Kremlin should end the war in Ukraine, release all political prisoners and adopt major reforms to stop the conflict between Russia and the West.
Almost 32 years since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, there are hopes that Russia will become an open democracy, said Dutsova, 40, a former journalist and mother of three.
Duntsova explains that she is being very careful with what she says because Russia has laws that can be used to prosecute critics of what the Kremlin calls a "special military operation" and says she has been warned not to talk too much. with foreign correspondents.
Putin's Russia
Putin's supporters say he has restored order and some of the Russian glory that was lost during the chaos of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Asked what she thinks of Putin, Dutsova laughs nervously.
"I don't think about Putin. When someone is in Europe and the USA, they say that Russia and the Russians are Putin and that is not correct. I do not support the war, because the decision was not made by all the citizens of this country", she explained.
Asked about nationalist criticism that many supporters of liberal democracy in Russia are Western agents bent on destroying Russia, she replied: "I am not a CIA agent."
She even said that fortunately she has not yet been labeled as a "foreign agent" by the Ministry of Justice.
"I love my country," says Dutsova, who was born in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk and lives in the provincial city of Rzhev in Tver Oblast.
The new Cold War?
Prosecutors summoned her last week to discuss her political views, including "war and peace". She laughed when asked about a Russian online article calling her "Catherine III" and citing Indira Gandhi and Nelson Mandela as her heroes.
Russia, according to her, should release political prisoners, including Alexei Navalny. Her proposals to rid the country of Putin's post-Soviet authoritarian rule and empty patriotism and hand power to parliament would cause an earthquake in Russia.
As she explains, hardliners in the West and in Russia would be happy to see her country isolated.
"Every day it becomes clear that the laws will become stricter and that there will be fewer and fewer rights and freedoms," she concluded. / Reuters and The Moscow Times
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