Foreign Affairs Committee on May 6th, 2021

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you, Mr. Bergeron.

I'm sorry, but that is all the time you had.

We will continue with the three final speakers.

Mr. Harris is next, for two-and-a-half minutes, and then Mr. Diotte and Mr. Oliphant.

Mr. Harris, please; the floor is yours.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you, Chair.

I'm going to give Mr. Volkov an opportunity to continue his response, but to ask as well, in that he just touched on it, about the use of the Internet.

Is that medium free? Is it easy for people inside Russia to actually see what goes on and receive information that's available on the Internet, or is that controlled as well?

[Leonid Volkov]

Putin is trying hard to put the Internet under control, but still it remains a relatively free medium, because the Russian Internet developed itself in the nineties, which was the time of political freedom and economic competition. It thus developed itself in a very competitive way, whereby every Internet service provider tried to build its own transborder link.

For instance, China has three transborder links for its domestic Internet providers, while Russia has more than 900 of them. The Chinese Internet was built by design as a very controllable one, while the Russian Internet was built as relatively free. Now, so far, Putin's efforts to put it under censorship are failing. They're not so successful.

Going back to your previous and very important question, once again, Putin was selling stability and the concept of poverty in the nineties, and that he was bringing stability, and so on. Now, however, Russia is going through a generational change. Putin has been there for 22 years now, so a whole generation has appeared of people who have not known anything but Putin, and they want change and they look for change.

These people are also native Internet users, not a native TV audience. The audience for Putin's TV propaganda decreases, while the audience of people who have Internet access increases. Also, people have travelled a lot. This is very contrary to what people experienced in communist times. People have been very able to travel to Europe to see how democracy is working and how society could live under a democracy, and so on.

It's a slow change. You are right. Putin still enjoys quite a lot of support. The polling of Levada is quite correct; he's at about 50%, but it's not any longer the 80% approval rating that he had 10 years ago. As many people manage to get access to different opinions on the Internet, people try to realize what's going on, and things such as, for instance, our investigative video are of great help here.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you very much, Mr. Harris.

We will now go to Mr. Diotte for five minutes, please.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Mr. Volkov, we were talking earlier about sanctioning people. How about an individual named Roman Abramovich?

[Leonid Volkov]

He's number one on our list. We suggested him also to the EU, to the U.K. and to the U.S. government. Putin has many asset holders—nominal holders whose assets are actually Putin's own—but Mr. Abramovich definitely holds the thickest wallet.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Excellent.

Just shifting to another topic, I have a large Ukrainian Canadian community in my riding here in western Canada. They and many other Canadians are really concerned with the aggressive actions Putin has taken against Ukraine. What are Mr. Navalny's views on the status of Crimea and eastern Ukraine and the threat that Russia could take further action?

[Leonid Volkov]

Alexei was asked many times about the annexation of Crimea. You could easily find many of his public statements on this.

To wrap it up very shortly, we recognize that the annexation of Crimea was unlawful. Putin has committed a crime against Russia and Russian national interests. He violated the international agreements, which caused sanctions to be applied against Russia—undermined credibility of our country in international co-operation and so on—after he publicly violated Russian obligations toward Crimea, according to the Budapest memorandum of 1994.

Now, not all of us.... When a crime is committed and when a crime is recognized, it could easily be reimbursed. When someone kills another person, we could punish the killer, but we are unable to revive the victim. Putin has created a huge problem for the world, which probably will remain a huge problem, like northern Cyprus, or the West Bank, or many other territories for the future. I mean, now there is the fact that there are two million Russian citizens suddenly in Crimea. Their opinion has to be taken into consideration.

We consider that maybe the future government of Russia and future government of Ukraine, with some international mediators, will be able to build some process to deal with the status of Crimea. It is an unlawful annexation, but now it looks like there is no simple way out of the situation that Putin created.

With regard to the eastern Ukraine, it's very clear. Putin's Russia committed crimes against humanity, sponsoring the civil war that has taken the lives of 13,000 people. It's a crime. Russia has to stop supporting paramilitaries in the Donbas region, has to act with agreement according to the Minsk agreements that Russia has signed to give border control to Ukraine, to stop supporting the separatist movements in Donbas, and then the situation will get back to normal. That's quite clear for us.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

I have a very quick question.

We talked a bit about your movement and how it's being repressed. What's the general state of the protest movement in Russia, and what has been done to suppress it? I was looking at a Reuters story, and it shows people basically painting over logos of Mr. Navalny, etc.

What's happening?

[Leonid Volkov]

What's happening is that Putin is very effectively building a society that was described by George Orwell in 1984. The painting over the graffiti belongs there, and many other things also belong there. He is really acting by the book.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Thanks very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you very much, Mr. Diotte.

We'll now go to our final set of questions, and it will go to Mr. Oliphant, for five minutes, please.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Mr. Volkov.

[Pursuant to a motion passed on May 11, 2021, a portion of this testimony has been deleted. See Minutes of Proceedings of May 11, 2021]

I want to assure you, following Mr. Chong's questions—you may or may not be aware—that on March 24, our Minister of Foreign Affairs issued another round of sanctions in direct response to Mr. Navalny's arrest and detention. We are constantly reviewing these sanctions.

We have two different regimes for sanctions in Canada. We make sure that they're both judicious and effective, so we won't be putting criminals on sanctions, despite people perhaps saying.... We look for very effective ways. We also do it in tandem with international partners, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, European Union and so on.

This is a constant discussion. If there are suggestions that you have for that, we're always happy to take them, because we will review them. However, we have two pieces of legislation that we have to follow. We're very careful in how we do that. That list on March 24 was done in concert with the Americans.

I want to get out of sanctions for a moment, though, and talk about the effect of the prosecutors' move against the anti-corruption foundation. How will that limit either your work in Russia or outside of Russia, and do you have any suggestions for Canada, with the prosecutors labelling you as an extremist organization for the anti-corruption work you're doing, on how we can be supportive?

[Leonid Volkov]

Thank you very much, Mr. Oliphant.

On sanctions, I think a lot of important things already have been said. I understand how complicated this process is, how many legal complications it has.

One little thing to add is that, of course, it's very important that the international community act together: Canada, United States, European Union and the U.K. However, let me suggest that the key part of the story is the U.K here.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Yes.

[Leonid Volkov]

If you could kind of push and influence the U.K. informally, it's most essential, because 80% of those assets in question are being stashed in London.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

I'll just mention that the government is aware of that and there are conversations.

[Leonid Volkov]

Thank you.

Now on the second matter, once again, this extremist organization status, this will have a lot of effect on our ability to conduct offline activities in Russia. Offline activities will become very dangerous for its participants and we will have to limit them to an absolute minimum. We'll have to relocate many of the employees and we'll have to focus on the online.

However, we know what to do. We have a lot of projects that we wanted to launch online but we didn't have resources to do that, because we were busy with some other things on the ground. Now we'll have our hands free to do these projects that were somewhere in the backlog; now we will get back to them, and hopefully Mr. Putin will not like the consequences of his decision to destroy our offline organization in the country.

Still, the most important thing is how many people we are able to reach. When we started our movement, we had maybe 50,000 followers. After Navalny's presidential campaign, when we built this regional network, we were able to reach several million people. Now we have a daily audience of about 15 million supporters and it's large. We'll keep talking to this audience despite all the problems with all the Internet censorship, and so on, and we'll keep growing it, using also the generational change that is happening in Russian politics now, on which I already elaborated in answering Mr. Harris's question.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

I know it's late where you are, but I want to thank you and also to say that I hope you have heard, even though we come at it differently, in Canada there's no difference of opinion among the parties on these issues of human rights and Mr. Navalny in Russia. We are very united on this and we'll constantly find ways to support you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you very much, Mr. Oliphant.

Colleagues, that brings us to the end of the period that was officially designated. However, I believe that Mr. Bergeron would like to ask the committee about potentially extending the time for questions.

[Stéphane Bergeron, Bloc, Montarville, QC]

Yes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Mr. Bergeron, the floor is yours.

[Stéphane Bergeron, Bloc, Montarville, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

With Mr. Volkov's permission, I would ask for unanimous consent from my colleagues so that we can continue the conversation, for a final round of two minutes per party.