Pro-government candidate expresses (limited) willingness to debate protest movement figurehead Lyubov Sobol

Update: A few hours after her initial response to Sobol’s proposal, Valeria Kasamara told journalists that a debate between Sobol and herself would be “impossible” because the two women are in “unequal positions.”

Lyubov Sobol, one of the independent Moscow City Duma candidates whose exclusion from Russia’s September elections has sparked mass protests since early July, challenged pro-government candidate Valeria Kasamara to a debate in a recorded video message. Kasamara initially told the independent television station Dozhd that she would be willing to debate Sobol on the Ekho Moskvy radio station. However, Kasamara later wrote on her Telegram channel that if she does decide to debate Sobol, she will only do so after the September 8 elections, “when political passions have died down.”

Sobol’s video message calling for a debate called Kasamara part of an “all-out attack on society.” The opposition politician, who works as an attorney for Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, also pointed out that every other opposition candidate for the Moscow City Duma is currently in jail, arguing that their sentences were intended to “allow you [Kasamara] and people like you to avoid the questions they raise.” Sobol became a particularly notable symbol of this summer’s protest movement when she began holding a hunger strike, which she has since ended.

Kasamara has drawn attention in the course of the protests for multiple reasons: She is the vice rector of the Higher School of Economics (HSE), and she is running for the Moscow City Duma in the same district where a different prominent opposition candidate, Ilya Yashin, attempted to register. The arrest of HSE student Egor Zhukov on charges of “mass rioting” has drawn further attention to Kasamara, who has spoken out in Zhukov’s favor.