U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision to meet Kremlin critics while visiting Russia shows that Washington is no longer willing to ignore democracy and human rights to cut deals with Moscow, opposition leader Garry Kasparov said.
Obama will meet representatives of nongovernmental organizations during his trip to Moscow, and he will also see opposition figures including Kasparov, a former chess champion who has become one of the Kremlin’s harshest critics.
“I think the fact of the meeting is more important than anything else,” Kasparov said in an interview Friday.
“It sends a signal the [U.S.] administration is probably ready to end this application of double standards which has been used for Putin’s Russia by foreign leaders for many years,” Kasparov said.
Kremlin critics say Western leaders have at times toned down criticism of Russia’s human rights violations, its poor record on democracy and its government-dominated media landscape to pursue lucrative business deals and win Moscow’s cooperation.
“What we always wanted is for America and other Western countries not to support Putin’s regime by pretending that Putin’s regime was democratic,” Kasparov said.
Kasparov heads The Other Russia movement, which relies mainly on street protests — often broken up by police — and online campaigning to get its message across. State-controlled media ignore him.
Kasparov will meet Obama along with Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov and two other leaders of small pro-Western opposition parties — Boris Nemtsov of Solidarity and Sergei Mitrokhin from Yabloko. Obama has no meeting scheduled with Boris Gryzlov, the parliamentary leader of the main pro-Kremlin party, United Russia.
Kasparov predicted that the worsening economic crisis in Russia would lead to a change in power and that the opposition would gather more support.
Russians were willing to live without democracy when the country was awash with money from oil and gas revenues, Kasparov said. But they are becoming increasingly angry now that the country is mired in a deep recession.
“Probably within the next 12 months, the political landscape will look very different. … I think that eventually the regime will crunch under the pressure of civil protest,” he said, declining to describe specific political changes.