Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee for hosting me. It's a great honour.
I will try to keep my open remarks very short because the most interesting and important part is always the Q and A, of course.
The basic facts are that Mr. Navalny has now been imprisoned for 180 days. He is now recovering from his hunger strike of the last 24 days, which he was on in order to get a medical examination by civil doctors he could trust after he developed numbness in his legs and in his arm during his unlawful imprisonment.
Despite the multiple requests from the...and the verdict of the European Court of Human Rights for his immediate release—the European Court of Human Rights being a integral part of the Russian legal system—the Russian government has refused to release him. So he is staying in prison.
Our abilities to be in touch with him are very limited. He is allowed to have visits by his lawyers Monday to Friday on working days. No letters are allowed, but his lawyers are still able to at least communicate with him verbally, so we are able to stay in touch with him through his lawyers.
In the meanwhile, the Kremlin has developed a new campaign, a crackdown, against Navalny's political organization. We don't have a formal party. We have filed papers to register a party nine times over the last eight years. All of these attempts to register a party have been rejected, so we have never been allowed to participate in an election as a political entity.
Still, we have a vibrant and strong political organization. We used to have 40 regional offices in all major Russian cities. Our candidates have managed to participate in local elections as independents—not being endorsed by any party—and have managed to win local elections many times.
Our movement runs completely on crowdfunding, so we are very able to crowdfund our anti-corruption investigations and our original offices and our electoral campaigns.
Inside Russia, we have several million supporters who are engaged while following our investigations on social media, donating to us and participating as campaign volunteers in our campaigns.
Now the prosecutor of Moscow has recently made a request to designate our political movement as extremist, which might sound fun for a very peaceful movement that only tries to get to participate in elections, but it's not that fun because it means that after the court decides that we are an extremist movement—this will happen on May 17, one week from now—the leaders of the movement could face up to 10 years in prison and donors, even if they send 100 rubles, like a $2 donation, up to eight years in prison, and the members up to six years in prison. So we have had to formally dissolve the movement, and as of now it formally no longer exists.
Having said that, we have stayed quite optimistic. We consider all of these moves by the Kremlin as their electoral campaign, their preparation for the upcoming election. Russia will elect the State Duma of the national parliament in four months, in mid-September. This will be a very important parliament. It will be sitting during the transition in 2024 when Mr. Putin will have to either get re-elected or to appoint someone else. Still, he will face some significant challenges to his upcoming transition. It is very important for him that this Duma be very clean, very sterile.
While the approval ratings of his party, United Russia, are about 27%, the Kremlin apparently admits that it's not possible to achieve the electoral results they wish, the constitutional majority in the Duma, without applying extraordinary measures. That's why not only is Alexei Navalny in prison, but also why very many important opposition figures are either under house arrest or forced to leave the country. It's why the Kremlin is trying to force us to close our original offices to prevent any independent politician from campaigning.
Putin has learned this lesson in the past and knows very well that it's the best strategy to stuff ballots and to rig the election on the day of polling. It's smart to steal the election in advance—just not letting anyone participate, not letting anyone like independent, competitive candidates be on the ballot. That's exactly what the Kremlin is doing now.
Still, we have our strategy, which is called “smart voting” or tactical voting as in the U.K., for instance. We endorse the relatively strongest candidates in every district. We ask our supporters to vote tactically for those who have the best chances to defeat and unseat the incumbent United Russia candidates. We hope that we will be able to achieve a lot in the September elections, based on our experience in two previous regional elections where we managed to defeat many of the United Russia members.
This will contribute to more political turbulence and more competition in Russian internal politics and we hope this will help us to push things a little bit towards democratic change and transition.
The final goal of our political movement is democratic change and transition, and we believe that Russia is basically a European country by its history and its culture. It belongs to Europe. Being European to us means having working institutions, competitive elections, fair courts, independent media and so on, everything that Putin has destroyed and demolished in the last 20 years, and everything that citizens actually need to define how the country should develop and where it should go.
Now we are often asked what does it mean? You want Russia to become a European country, but what does it mean? Portugal and Denmark, Sweden, are so different. But they have the greatest common divisor, which is that they have working democratic institutions, which citizens may use to decide where the country will go, like Liberal to Conservative, left to right, a little bit here, a little bit there. These are very important things, and we have to realize that Russian citizens do not have any of these tools in their possession now, and the basic thing now, the basic strategy, is just to reinstate the basic political institutions to relaunch political competitions, which are now close to non-existent in Russia.
That's were we are now, where we are going. I'm very much waiting for your questions.
Thank you so much for your attention.
