Eurasia Press & News
Russian opposition politician Mikhail Kasyanov, President Vladimir Putin’s first prime minister, has warned that the outcome of the war Moscow launched against Ukraine will determine Russia’s future, and if Ukraine falls, “the Baltic states will be next.”
Kasyanov, now an outspoken critic of the president, told the French news agency AFP in a video interview published on June 13 that at first he didn’t believe Putin would actually unleash a full-scale war against Ukraine.
But when he saw a meeting of Russia’s Security Council called just three days before the invasion was launched on February 24, “I realized, yes, there will be a war.”
“I just know these people and by looking at them I saw that Putin is already out of it. Not in a medical sense but in political terms,” he said, adding he “knew a different Putin.”
Kasyanov, 64, said he was confident Putin would eventually be replaced by a “quasi-successor” controlled by Russia’s powerful security services but that eventually Russia could return to democracy, albeit with difficulty.
“I am certain that Russia will return to the path of building a democratic state,” Kasyanov, who was prime minister between 2000-2004, told AFP.
He estimated it would take about a decade to conduct “de-Communization” and “de-Putinization” of the country.
“This will be difficult, especially after this criminal war.”
Kasyanov said Putin, a former KGB colonel and ex-chief of the communist-era political police’s successor, the FSB, has over the past two decades established a system dominated by former and current members of Russia’s security services.
“Essentially, this is a KGB system based on complete lawlessness. It is clear that they do not expect any punishment,” he said.
“These are the achievements of a system that, with the encouragement of Putin as head of state, has started operating even in a more cynical, cruel manner than in the final stages of the Soviet Union,” he added.
Kasyanov, who advocated close ties with the West as prime minister, joined Russia’s opposition and became one of the Kremlin’s most vocal critics after being sacked by Putin.
He is now the leader of the opposition People’s Freedom party, or PARNAS, but has left Russia for an undisclosed location out of concern for his safety.
“I have no doubt that now, after the tragedy that we are all witnessing, the opposition will unite,” he said.
“Everything will have to be rebuilt anew. Essentially, an entire set of economic and social reforms should be started all over again…These are enormous and difficult tasks and they will have to be done.”
