A Russian university professor was forced to resign from his post a week after his comments about Vladimir Putin were published: report

• A Russian professor was forced to resign for comments he made in an interview with Radio Liberty.
• The professor was talking about how some citizens in the city of Khabarovsk don't trust Putin.

A Russian professor was forced to resign from his post on Friday just a week after his comments about Russian President Vladimir Putin were published online.

Vitaly Blazhevich was a sociology candidate — a kind of Russian equivalent to a PhD — at the Far East Institute of Management in the city of Khabarovsk in eastern Russia, according to Sibir.Realii, the Siberian branch of Radio Liberty news outlet, which is funded by the US.

In a previous interview with Radio Liberty, Blazhevich was asked about the fate of Sergei Furgal, a popular former governor of Khabarovsk, who was sentenced to prison on February 10 after a jury found him guilty of two murder charges.

Furgal was elected governor in 2018, unexpectedly beating the Kremlin-supported incumbent candidate. His arrest two years later sparked mass demonstrations with protesters claiming the detention was politically motivated. Furgal also has maintained that he is innocent.

The former governor's arrest has led Khabarovsk residents to declare that they do not trust Putin, Blazhevich, the Russian professor, said in the Radio Libert interview.

"Khabarovsk residents clearly, quite clearly—under repression, by the way, but still—said that they refuse to trust Putin, specifically. When Putin refused to trust Furgal, Khabarovsk residents at one of the largest rallies said loudly and clearly (there was only one declaration of this entire rally): from now on we refuse to trust Putin," Blazhevich said.

Those comments were published on February 10 on Radio Liberty's website and on YouTube. On Friday, he was forced to resign.

Blazhevich later shared news of his resignation with Sibir.Realli and The New York Times. He told the Siberian outlet that senior executives at the Far East Institute of Management told him to resign.

According to Blazhevich, one of the reasons he was being reprimanded for his comments was because the university is partly supported by the government. The Far East Institute of Management is a branch of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA).

The professor also claimed that he was pulled into a meeting with Oleg Kulikov, a deputy of the State Duma, Russia's parliament.

In their conversation, Kulikov threatened that an administrative case could be opened if Blazhevich's comments were handed to the police and that he could be dismissed "for immorality" under labor law.

Blazhevich said he was told, "We are professors, we have no right to speak badly about the president."

"According to their logic, it turns out that having an opinion is immoral," Blazhevich told Sibir.Realii.

The professor said that he did not discuss politics during working hours with colleagues or students, leading him to believe that the university was not entirely behind his forced resignation.

"These are ordinary bureaucrats," Blazhevich said, referring to university leadership. "They do as they were told. They want to receive a salary and keep their jobs."

Blazhevich was under a one-year contract with the school and decided it was easier to resign.

"I agreed to write a resignation notice because there is nothing to fight for," he told the news outlet. "I realized that it would be easier for me, otherwise they would keep trying to find fault."

Blazhevich's conflict with the university was featured in a recent Times story, exemplifying how Putin has changed Russia since the war in Ukraine began nearly a year ago: a country slowly shedding itself of liberal or western influence and stamping out dissenting opinion.

Blazhevich told the Times that his comments would not have typically been met with any punishment, but that, now, the government's crackdown on opposing views is "like a steamroller."

"Everyone is just being rolled into the asphalt," he told The Times.

During the first weeks of the Russian invasion, Kremlin began cracking down on dissent by blocking social media sites and enacting a law that would imprison people for sharing "false information" about the war in Ukraine.

Nearly 5,000 anti-war protesters in Russia were arrested in March, NPR reported, citing a report from OVD-Info, a Russian human rights group.