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Number of Deputies Who Went Against Putin: 1
Look at the face in this picture. This man made his “final” speech in Moscow the other day. He is a brave man. He told the Russian people the truth about the massacre in Bucha committed by Russian soldiers and now nine years of imprisonment await him.
When — if — the spell of the cult of death is broken and Russia frees itself from this period of self-hate, Ilya Yashin’s speech will go down as one of the best in Russia’s sad, and self-destructive history.
Ilya Yashin is only 39 years old. If the authoritarianism of Putin is not overthrown, then Yashin will still be a young man if he survives the full sentence. Russia, however, likes to add time to prison sentences to pretend that investigators are working furiously to uncover additional wrongs by the convicted.
Yashin will return to a different society in nine years. He will be a different man. The piss and vinegar he is full of now will have been used up to keep him warm, and alive in the “penal colony.”
Long active in opposition circles, Yashin was elected in 2017 as a deputy of the Moscow municipal deputy. Popular, he announced his intentions to run for mayor of Moscow in opposition to the Kremlin’s hand-picked candidate…
