Bair Tsirenov, a member of the People’s Khural of Buryatia who is standing for election to the Russian State Duma as a candidate for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, has posted campaign videos featuring the slogan ‘peace – peace’ and the question ‘when will the special military operation end?’. The Russian authorities officially refer to the war against Ukraine as a ‘special military operation’.
Tsirenov wrote that these videos are being shown on television, and admitted he was surprised: according to him, they have not yet been taken off the air. The same videos also raise other questions — “Why is everything getting more expensive?”, “Why block the internet?”, “Why do we need a scrap collection levy?” and “How can we live with such taxes?”.
As noted by Radio Free Europe’s ‘Siberia. Realities’ project, this is not the first time the Communists have raised the issue of ending Russia’s war against Ukraine, although the CPRF itself has, on the whole, repeatedly supported the full-scale invasion that began in 2022.
In May, Renat Suleimanov, a CPRF deputy in the State Duma, stated that Russia needed to end the war in Ukraine as soon as possible, because the country’s economy could not withstand the conflict continuing any longer.
And in June, another CPRF representative in the State Duma, Valery Markhaev, said that the country needed a “clear and public plan” for exiting the current war in Ukraine, otherwise all “responsibility for a future social explosion would fall on the unchanging authorities”.