TAI’s Damir Marusic and Karina Orlova recently sat down with Vladimir Milov—a Russian opposition activist, adviser to top Putin opponent Alexei Navalny, and former Deputy Energy Minister of Russia—as he was passing through Washington. Tune in this week for a special episode as they discuss the strategy of the Russian opposition, the growing discontent in Russia’s regions, and the fate of U.S. foreign policy in the age of Trump. And follow along below with our lightly edited transcript of the conversation.Damir Marusic for TAI:  We’re very pleased to have Vladimir Milov here with us today. Mr. Milov, welcome.Vladimir Milov: Great pleasure. Thanks for having me.DM: Here in the States we’ve been paying close attention to the protests that have been roiling Moscow, but also all across Russia. You spent some time in prison as a result. Could you tell us a little bit about what’s going on to orient our listeners?VM: I think what happened this summer was a big first test for Vladimir Putin since his triumphant re-election in March 2018. The authorities did their best to demonstrate huge numbers of support during the presidential election that we had a couple of years ago. But it’s pretty obvious for everybody involved in Russian politics that since then he has experienced a tremendous collapse in public support. And this has happened for a variety of reasons. The bottom line is that we have an unprecedented economic crisis by length, probably the biggest since the collapse of the Soviet Union.This year we mark the 11th anniversary without meaningful economic growth. We’re essentially back to square one, where we were before the financial crash of the autumn of 2008. And we are right now having the sixth consecutive year with a decline in real disposable incomes. They shrank roughly by 15 to 20 percent since 2014 and obviously Russians are not happy about it. Moreover, they don’t see a good economic prospect for recovery, which is bothering them even more. They want Putin to reshuffle things, and I don’t know, appoint a new energetic government, come up with a plan to do something about the economy, because this is really beginning to bite.And we in the opposition actually saw something like this coming. We saw a big growth of discontent and we wanted to channel it into political support for change, for an alternative, because many people are realizing that 20 years is a long time and enough is enough. When people sit in power for too long they lose the motivation to improve things.So what happened was one of the biggest elections besides the federal Parliament and President: the elections for the Moscow City legislature, which is the third biggest parliament in the country. You can do a lot of stuff if you control the Moscow City Parliament.The opposition presented a pool of really good candidates. Nearly all of them were banned on absolutely ridiculous grounds. We protested, and at the end of the day issued an ultimatum to the authorities that if they don’t register us by a certain date, we’d come in big numbers, take it to the streets. We really came in big numbers. The authorities were not happy. They jailed all of us, but then more people came. Because of this great increase in the extent of repression many apolitical people started to express concern. We saw many videos posted online and on Instagram by leaders of public opinion, artists, bloggers, and rappers to an extent unseen before.So the authorities have calmed down a little bit, and released many of us including myself. I spent about 30 days in jail this August. Then we had the actual voting which was pretty successful in terms of mobilizing the protest vote. Bottom line, what happened shows that this picture that you see in the headlines in a lot of the Western media, that Putin is super popular, is just not true. There’s growing discontent among the public. A lot of Russians are unhappy that they don’t h