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

Accoladed director Andrey Zvyagintsev has sent a direct message to Vladimir Putin urging him to start listening to the Russian people and end the “senseless” war in Ukraine, continuing a war of words between Russia’s most revered living film-maker and the Kremlin that started at the Cannes film festival awards ceremony over the weekend. “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. When Putin’s longstanding spokesperson Dmitry Peskov was asked about passing on the anti-war message at a press conference on Monday, however, he flatly rejected the idea. “I, for one, will not do it,” Peskov told reporters at a daily briefing. …