Put an end to this war': Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev makes new plea to Putin

A celebrated Russian director sent a direct message to Vladimir Putin urging him to listen to Russian people and stop the war in Ukraine. The message condemned the violence and loss of young people and warned that nothing good would come without stopping. The director delivered the appeal after receiving a major film prize in France and asked Putin’s entourage to relay the message. The Kremlin spokesperson refused to pass it on, saying the director had no right to call for peace because he had not condemned alleged violence in Donbas. In response, the director said Putin had never heard the voices of Russian citizens, and that silencing critics would not change that reality.

"Except for the limbs torn off from your fellow citizens in the name of an illusory goal, except for the massacre of young people that the country needs to build life and the future nothing good is on the horizon if we don't stop, the exiled auteur said in a message sent to the Russian president's press secretary through official channels on Tuesday."

"Accepting the Grand Prix for his new film Minotaur on the French Riviera on Saturday night, Zvyagintsev had appealed to Putin to stop this butchery [] the whole world is waiting for this. Zvyagintsev had prefaced his speech with an acknowledgment that Putin was unlikely to follow the Cannes livestream personally, and urged the Russian leader's entourage to relay the appeal instead."

"I, for one, will not do it, Peskov told reporters at a daily briefing. I do not think that anyone else will do it. Peskov said that the director of prize-winning films such as The Return and Leviathan did not have the right to appeal to peace because he had never condemned the massacre in the Donbas the alleged violence against Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine that Russian disinformation campaigns use as a pretext for justifying its military campaign."

"In a response sent to Peskov on Tuesday morning, which has been seen by the Guardian, Zvyagintsev said it was true that he did not have a voice in the matter, but neither did a hundred million Russian citizens, because Putin had never heard their voices. For the Kremlin to silence its critics"

Read at www.theguardian.com