“And so I want to say to the Ukrainian people, who are going through such a difficult time right now, but every day of your struggle you are free people, and you live a full life, and it is very important, of course, to win, but no matter how hard this life is, life in a voluntary annexation to Russia will be much worse.”

“And so I want to say to the Ukrainian people, who are going through such a difficult time right now, but every day of your struggle you are free people, and you live a full life, and it is very important, of course, to win, but no matter how hard this life is, life in a voluntary annexation to Russia will be much worse.”

Natan Sharansky is one of those figures whose biography gives unusual weight to a discussion about freedom, dictatorship and Ukraine. Born in Donetsk in 1948, he became a Soviet dissident and human-rights activist, spent nine years in Soviet prisons and labor camps, was released in a 1986 spy exchange and moved to Israel. He later served in senior Israeli government posts and headed the Jewish Agency.

That background makes his new interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (September 6, 2026) especially relevant now. Sharansky speaks not only as a former Soviet prisoner, but as someone who personally met Vladimir Putin several times and later concluded that the Russian president had become, in his eyes, a war criminal. We covered the conversation in detail at NAnews — Nikk.Agency Israel News.

Why Sharansky thinks Putin is becoming weaker

Sharansky’s central argument is that the war is gradually damaging the political foundation on which Putin’s rule depends.

Russian military and economic elites, he says, could tolerate much as long as they believed Putin was a strong leader who could protect their position. A prolonged war changes that calculation. The longer Russia fails to achieve a decisive result in Ukraine, the more that image of strength is eroded.

Sharansky connects the tightening of repression inside Russia to that same weakness. In his view, a dictatorship that has to........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)