Critic predicts Ukraine will be Putin's downfall
Russian-Canadian activist says elites will turn against leader
Pyotr Verzilov has been jailed by Russian authorities too many times to keep track, was poisoned, allegedly, on the orders of the Kremlin, and is now essentially in exile.
But the joint Russian-Canadian citizen, once a spokesman for the Pussy Riot feminist-punk band and now head of an independent Russian news outlet, is feeling surprisingly optimistic about his native land's future.
Moscow's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and the economic fallout it triggered will seriously backfire on Vladimir Putin, he insists. The former Toronto resident foresees the president's demise, and the birth of a new nation that lives peacefully with its neighbours.
“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,” Verzilov said from Berlin. “World history knows no other way and this will inevitably happen much sooner than we think.”
Meanwhile, he's helping document that war as a journalist, and last week joined the wives of two Ukrainian soldiers holed up in Mariupol for an audience with Pope Francis. They pleaded for help in getting troops out of a steel plant in the decimated city, and Verzilov says the Vatican has already had success with back-channel negotiations.
Just two decades ago, he was a teenager transplanted with his family to Canada, where his nuclear-physicist father, Yury, still works. He attended high school at Toronto's Humberside Collegiate Institute and became a Canadian citizen, before returning to Russia — and what turned into a life of activism against Putin and the president's tightening grip on the country.
Verzilov was married to one of the members of Pussy Riot, the group whose sometimes outrageous brand of protest earned them repeated terms in Russian jails. He stormed the field during a 2018 World Cup soccer match in Moscow in a protest against police brutality, and released a bag of cockroaches in the courtroom where two art dealers were being tried for an exhibit that satirized the Orthodox Church.
And he became a marked man. Verzilov fell suddenly ill in 2018 — temporary blindness, delirium and loss of speech — from what German doctors eventually concluded was poisoning. The activist had been investigating the killing of three Russian journalists.
It is, of course, difficult to know what moves Putin may make next in Ukraine or how the war will end. But Verzilov believes that Moscow's losses and the punishing effect of sanctions will leave the president with little choice but to negotiate some kind of resolution.
And after years of watching the regime — and feeling its wrath — he thinks it will ultimately not end well for Putin personally.
“He's essentially bankrupted Russia, he's destroyed the economy, he's destroyed his own economic achievements of the last 20 years,” said Verzilov. “It is impossible for him to hold onto power and to control his own elites once the war comes to its inevitable conclusion.”