Mrs. Narusova, these words of yours about not stretching the truth, they are sort of a leading idea of your earlier speeches, not just the latest one, am I correct?
Absolutely. The thing is that we cannot even call a spade a spade.
You spoke against raising the retirement age and against the bill on “discrediting the military”. You were also the first major official to mention conscripts fighting in the Ukraine war, which you did in March 2022, and so on. Do you have any like-minded fellow senators out of those 170, or are you all alone there?
I guess it would be immodest to say so… Well, I’m the only one who votes [against]. But there are enough people who think the same as me. It’s just that they are afraid to speak it out loud. The recent situation with the conversation between Farhad Akhmedov and Iosif Prigozhin shows that although the biggest supporters [of the current policy] participate in all those events at Luzhniki Stadium or in the Red Square, this does not mean that they actually support sincerely what’s going on.