Russian State TV Guest Calls for Putin’s Removal

The anchor on a Russian state television show quickly interrupted Russian opposition politician Boris Nadezhdin after he suggested that Vladimir Putin be ousted from office.

During a discussion on the program Mesto Vstrechi (Meeting Place), Nadezhdin, who has opposed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, said that under the current political regime in Russia, “there is no way for us to come back to Europe.”

“We simply have to choose different authorities to govern the country that would stop this story with Ukraine,” he said on the show on NTV, one of the three main state channels. He believed that a different government would allow Russia to “build relations” with European countries and “everything will come back into place.”

Co-anchor Ivan Trushkin tried to interrupt him, by saying that. “I was expecting you to say all of this, word for word,” adding that his views were “boring.”

Undeterred, Nadezhdin said that in 2024 there would be a presidential election in Russia, and that “we need to choose somebody else, and not Putin. Everything will be good then.”

In January, the newspaper Kommersant reported that the Kremlin is preparing for Putin to run for re-election in a ballot that is likely to be held in March 2024, regardless of the state of his invasion of Ukraine. The Russian constitution has been changed so that Putin could technically remain in power until 2036.

The other anchor, Andrey Norkin, insisted that voters would listen to what Nadezhdin had said, “and do the exact opposite” and in the crossfire of both speaking, Norkin concluded, “Let’s pause things there.” Newsweek has contacted the Kremlin for comment.

The clip was tweeted by Ukrainian internal affairs adviser Anton Gerashchenko, who wrote, “For the first time on Russian TV, propagandists said that Putin and the country’s leadership must resign and others need to be elected.”

While it is unclear that this is the first call on state TV for Putin to leave power and criticism of the Kremlin is rare, Nadezhdin has been a regular guest on the program and his stance on the war would have been well known to producers.

He has previously criticized Russia’s actions in Ukraine and called for peace talks aimed at halting the war. On the same program, he said in January that the war was “a disastrous mistake and that it is a senseless situation leading the country to a dead end.”

A Moscow municipal deputy, Nadezhdin was an ally of the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered in 2015 in front of the Kremlin.