Defying Vladimir Putin

"I'm sure that Russians will dismantle Putin's regime and spend a long time actively and successfully working to get this horrible war past them."

"World history knows no other way and this will inevitably happen much sooner than we think."

"You cannot get honest poll results when you're asking people questions and they feel a wrong answer could lead to a criminal conviction."

"I would say the number of people [in Russia] against the war is definitely higher than people who support what has happened."

"He's [Vladimir Putin] essentially bankrupted Russia, he's destroyed the economy, he's destroyed his own economic achievements of the last 20 years."

"It is impossible for him to hold on to power and to control his own elites once the war comes to its inevitable conclusion."

Pyotr Verzilov, Russian-Canadian citizen, Russia critic, journalist

A group of Ukrainian soldiers’ wives and Russian opposition activist Pyotr Verzilov met Pope Francis at the Vatican to seek his help in rescuing the hundreds of Ukrainian defenders currently making a last stand at Mariupol’s besieged Azovstal steel plant.  @gruppa_voina / Twitter

He was brought to Canada by his father as a young boy, where his father took up a position in the country as a nuclear-physicist. It was in Toronto that Pyotr Verzilov went to high school. After he became a Canadian citizen he returned to Russia with the intention of embarking on an activist lifestyle, hoping to help his native country move on from the autocratic governing style of Vladimir Putin to become a democracy.

 

Married to a member of Pussy Riot, the female group whose outrageously mocking style of dissidence earned them and him a number of prison terms, his experience is one that many in the country recognize as a reward from their government for spirited political activism. In 2018 he suddenly became ill with a temporary blindness, delirium and loss of the ability to speak. Doctors in Germany concluded he had been poisoned, a favourite Kremlin solution for criticism. 

Last November his name appeared on the Russian Interior Ministry's online wanted list for the crime of failing to report his double Canadian citizenship. By that time he was the publisher of Media Zona, an independent news source blocked y the Kremlin when Russia attacked Ukraine. The news group's Russian employees were moved outside Russia and has someone managed to retain its five million-wide monthly readership.

Russians make use of virtual private networks for access to banned online resources. As an investigative journalist and an avowed enemy-critic of Vladimir Putin's regime, Verzilov dismisses Putin's accusations of neo-Nazi and fascist groups operating in Ukraine, extending to the government itself.

One of the two military units remaining in Mariupol, fighting to retain possession of the destroyed steelworks plant, is the Azov Battalion accused of Nazi links.

Its start as a far-right militia, reborn from a fascist group with the same name during World War II that aligned itself with the German SS and was involved in the slaughter of Jews, has moved beyond that ideological slant when its modern founder left the group for politics. Its ranks now include patriotic Ukrainian Jews and other people of ethnic backgrounds. Ukraine's main LGBTQ group has backed the Azov Battalion according to Verzilov. "Which would not be possible in any way if they were truly ultra right wing", he concludes.

Pyotr Verzilov believes that the immense losses incurred by this ill-begotten war with the punishing effect of sanctions will end up forcing President Putin to negotiate a resolution of some kind and ultimately withdraw without having achieved any of the yardsticks for success he had planned for the invasion. A resolution that will not end kindly for the man who brought war once again to Europe and who has devastated Ukraine for his vain conceit of reinstituting a version of the Soviet Union.