Ilya Ponomarev offers an eminently sensible critique of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine from a pro-Russian point of view. Ukraine and Russia, he says, are inextricably bound by culture and history, but by launching a military action, Putin has driven Ukraine into the arms of NATO and ensured that Ukrainians will oppose any union with Moscow. “He has accomplished exactly the opposite of his agenda,” says Ponomarev, a legislator from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk.
It says a lot about the current state of Russia that, for articulating this view and for casting the sole vote in the Duma against the annexation of Crimea, Ponomarev is being vilified in state media and on a billboard in the center of Moscow as a “national traitor.”
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