I’m in a Russian prison. This is how my friend Alexei Navalny showed us Putin’s hypocrisy | Ilya Yashin

Putin claims to embody faith and family values only to manipulate ordinary Russians. But Alexei truly lived by them

• Ilya Yashin is a Russian opposition politician. He is a former leader of the People's Freedom party

Vladimir Putin speaks often, and at length, about conservative values. Europe and the US want to impose their debauched and godless ways on us, he tells Russians, to frighten them and to justify a standoff against the collective west". On the subject of the war, he expounds that only the Russian army can save Ukrainian schoolchildren from gender-neutral toilets". His electoral manifesto places a heavy emphasis on the family as the basis of Russian society, and on his commitment to tradition and religious belief.

All this rhetoric is pure hypocrisy. Conservative discourse is, for Putin, no more than a political tool for manipulating the consciousness of the populace. The reality is that the Russian president leads an immoral life, wholly contrary to the values he purports to embody.

Ilya Yashin is a Russian opposition politician, and was a close ally of Alexei Navalny. He was the leader of the People's Freedom party. In 2022 he was charged with spreading false information after reporting on the Russian military's war crimes in Bucha, and sentenced to eight and a half years in prison

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