Translated material
It's time for Europe to decide
I’m in Brussels with Denis Bilunov and Oleg Kozlovsky, going to a meeting with European deputies.
Our common task is to tell the truth about the elections in Russia, about fraud, protests by thousands, illegal detentions and kidnappings.
But in addition to the general task, I have a special mission.
I am going not only to complain to Europe, not to ask for help: help in any way you can in the fight against the bloody regime. It would be great, of course, for Europe to put democratic ideals above its interest in buying Russian energy and introduce full-scale sanctions against a regime that is clearly losing the last vestiges of legitimacy and respectability. But this is still hard to believe...
But, in my opinion, Europe is simply obliged to refrain from directly contributing to the destruction of civil society in Russia:
1. Western companies are now involved in corrupt and anti-democratic projects in Russia. A striking example is the participation of the Vinci company in the Moscow-St. Petersburg highway project. After all, it was Vinci who insisted that the project for the route through the Khimki forest not be changed as 76% of the population wanted - under the threat of the Russian side paying compensation of 5.5 billion rubles. Such activities of Western big business are destroying Russia's nascent civil society and directly discrediting the West.
2. The project of a route through the Khimki forest is not the only case where Western business may find itself directly drawn into a conflict with Russian civil society. It has already been announced ( at the level of the General Staff of the Russian Federation ) about plans to purchase sniper rifles from the West - to shoot the dissatisfied at the “hour of H.” And computers and software used for hacker attacks on independent information resources are unlikely to be of purely Russian origin.
3. There is a real threat of de facto colonization of Russia by big Western business, when Western companies collude with local kinglets and act to the detriment of the interests of the vast majority of citizens, turning a blind eye to flagrant violations of human rights. Again, a striking example is the offshore scheme built by the Vinci company, which used money for the M-S highway project. St. Petersburg will go through Vinci to a whole network of offshore companies, including Cyprus to the company of Arkady Rotenberg, a close friend of Putin. This is all the more unfair since the M-Sp toll highway is being built, in fact, with the money of Russian taxpayers. So why should the profit from the project go to Vinci and the oligarchs?!
4. We understand that the West can influence the Russian authorities, but does not really want to interfere - to the detriment of its short-term financial interests. So, at least influence your own companies, which apply different standards when working in the West and in Russia! Force your own companies to withdraw from dangerous corruption projects!
Let's start with Vinci!
I will ask MEPs to adopt legislative restrictions that exclude the participation of Western companies in shameful projects in Russia, like the Moscow-St. Petersburg highway project through the Khimki forest.