IA three-day meeting of Russian politicians ended on Monday in the Jablonna Palace outside the gates of Warsaw. Like the only partially freely elected parliament in the Soviet Union from 1989, the event was called the “Congress of People’s Deputies”. Several dozen people participated in person or online. Among them were four deputies of the Russian State Duma and other people’s representatives elected to various bodies in recent decades.
The aim of the “congress”, as former Duma deputy Ilya Ponomarev said, is to create a parliament in exile in the hope of gaining international recognition and preparing and overseeing a change of power in Russia. “We have created a very lively, working mechanism,” said Ponomarev, who was a member of the Russian parliament until 2016, in his closing remarks. The debates were broadcast online. The Polish media, in particular, reported extensively, and the leading Polish reformers of the reunification period, Adam Michnik and Leszek Balcerowicz, were also seen in Jablonna.
One point of contention at the meetings was the question of whether the killing of President Vladimir Putin or armed resistance in Russia is permissible in order to achieve system change in Russia. The Ukrainian opposition MP Oleksiy Honcharenko, who was on the line, called on the Russians to find a “Stauffenberg” in their ranks, an assassin who would eliminate Putin. Among the participants was certainly a “Willy Brandt” who would one day fall on his knees at the sites of Russian atrocities in Ukraine and ask for forgiveness. However, a number of participants advocated placing Putin’s fate in the hands of an international court. Deposing Putin was an undisputed goal: “The war will only end when the Putin regime falls,” said former Duma deputy Gennady Gudkov. This requires further pressure on the battlefield and sanctions.
Polish observers expressed some skepticism. One objection was that of the leading Russian opposition figures, only the exiled entrepreneur Mikhail Khodorkovsky sympathizes with the “Congress”. The next meeting, according to Ponomaryov, could take place at the end of February 2023, on the first anniversary of the Russian invasion. Then bills for the Russia of the future would be dealt with in second reading. The Jablonna Palace is a historic place: the first “round table” of the Eastern Bloc was set up here in October 1988. However, the actual negotiations on the change of power did not begin until February 1989 in what is now the Presidential Palace in Warsaw.