Russian election candidate calls Ukraine war a ‘big mistake’ by Putin
A politician bidding to run against Vladimir Putin in Russia’s upcoming presidential election described the decision to go to war in Ukraine as a “big mistake."
A politician bidding to run against Vladimir Putin in Russia’s upcoming presidential election described the decision to go to war in Ukraine as a “big mistake” in comments to the wives of soldiers on Thursday.
Boris Nadezhdin, representing a centre-right party called Civic Initiative that has no seats in parliament, is seeking to gather the necessary 100,000 signatures from people across Russia to enable him to stand against Putin.
Nadezhdin, 60, told the soldiers’ wives that the war, which the Kremlin calls a “special military operation”, was “a big mistake by Putin, of course, and the consequences will be very grave.”
He said that soldiers at the front were “fulfilling their debt, really spilling their blood there and risking their life — we want them simply to come back.”
Putin’s supporters and opponents alike see his re-election as beyond doubt, given his total control of the levers of power and the fact that his best-known opponent, Alexei Navalny, is serving jail terms totaling more than 30 years in an Arctic penal colony.
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