The Final Statement
‘My method is traditional. Students come to me to study, qualify as hackers, and then return home to protect their businesses, their families, and their countries. They do not attack their neighbours or engage in criminal activity; they serve their own communities using the skills they have acquired, as responsible citizens. But the FSB’s method is different–it turns law-abiding citizens into criminals.’
Your Honour, respected members of the court, respected audience, respected readers!
The truth always comes to light. You cannot silence everyone. Don’t blame the mirror if your face is crooked.
The history of Buddhism is the history of victories over ignorance. And the Buddha triumphs not because you stand on the winning side, but because you stop wasting time on trivialities and focus on what truly matters at the present moment.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the opening of the first hacking school, which I later called the Civil Hackers School. I chose that name to emphasize that we are not a security service. We study advanced technologies, provide education, and raise responsible citizens not only of Russia, but of their own countries. During these 30 years, I have travelled to many countries, both neighbouring and distant, including Kyiv and Minsk, Vilnius and Riga, New York and San Francisco. Yet Moscow has always been the main stage of my life. Here I have the largest number of students of different faiths, nationalities, and political views.
I have always regarded conflict between countries and peoples as something harmful, as suffering that should be prevented. This is consistent with the Buddha’s teaching. And in May 2010, when I took the bodhisattva vow in Moscow from Zen Master Jordan Thorn, my educational mission became a Zen mission in Russia. I stopped teaching at state institutions. Religion in Russia is separate from the state. Those who wished to study with me came to my home. Some studied meditation, others studied hacking. I remained, and remain, someone who unites these two great paths.
Now I am preparing for monastic ordination in the same Soto Zen tradition. This criminal case was not initiated because I allegedly committed a crime. The reason for what is happening is the intrigue of a lieutenant from the regional office of the FSB, who filed a report and supplied the investigators with his own expert for the sole purpose of creating an obstacle on the Great Way. Such obstacles have been known in the Buddhist tradition since ancient times. They go back to the moment when the founder of Buddhism, Buddha Shakyamuni, sitting beneath the Bodhi tree, saw the morning star and attained enlightenment. He too was tempted and distracted from his path.
One such story tells of a vision of countless warriors. According to the legend, they were the army of Mara, the lord of illusion. Some might compare him to Satan or the Devil. In other words, the security forces of that era descended upon the Buddha. Yet he remained seated beneath the tree. For him it ended quickly. He emerged and addressed the monastic community. That is how the monastic tradition ultimately began.
We have encountered such things before. And to help a new person enter the Buddhist monastic community requires the support of the Buddha’s sangha, the support of one’s own tradition, the support of Buddhists everywhere. I have that support. You can see it, Your Honour. And I will reach that goal. I do not know whether it will happen this year or in eight years, but the truth always prevails, and all these hidden intrigues will eventually come to light.
We all watched the Artemis II mission around the Moon. It is being carried out by Americans and one Canadian, but it matters to all humanity. Space exploration began in the Soviet Union, where I and many of us were born. Yet that achievement made such flights possible for citizens of the United States as well. The mission of the Civil Hackers School is no less important. When I began teaching hacking in 1996, people around me did not understand whether it was even possible…
Judge: Ilya Vladimirovich, under Article 293, I could not interrupt your final statement, but I may do so if your remarks cease to concern the circumstances relevant to the criminal case before the court. Please confine yourself more closely to the materials of the case and the charges against you.
I am describing previous occasions when the FSB put obstacles in my way, interfered with my work, and tried to poison the well from which everyone drinks. But what Lieutenant Batashin, who appears in this case as a witness, has done surpasses all their previous attempts in terms of arrogance and destructive consequences. He placed his narrow departmental interests above the interests of Russia. Unfortunately, some hackers work for the FSB, others for the SBU, the Ukrainian security service, and caught up in this major international conflict they are forced to fight one another. But this too shall pass, just as countless wars and conflicts have passed throughout history. Our task, Russia’s task, is not to be left with nothing.
The Zen school to which I belong, and whose robes I wear, observes neutrality. I observe neutrality. I did not leave Moscow, my city, during these difficult years. I did not join either side of the conflict. I continue to meditate in my native city. I continue developing the programmable device ‘Elektronika MK-261’ for civilian purposes, continuing the tradition of the Soviet calculators on which I myself grew up. Unfortunately, because of my arrest, I can no longer work on it as productively as before, when I developed the project without a single kopeck of government funding.
Relationships between politicians and their followers change, but technologies remain, and they must be improved regardless. This trial clearly demonstrates why I chose the diamond of Zen as the foundation of my hacking school, and why it cannot be built on the shifting sands of intelligence agencies or other state institutions. I teach hacking, including both defensive and offensive technologies, but I also teach respect for the laws of one’s own country and for its Constitution. This is the common position of Zen. Japanese masters built their martial arts schools on the same principle. My generation and those older than me remember how difficult it was for karate to take root in the late Soviet Union. Karate masters broke no laws, yet the KGB disrupted their training and imprisoned them. Some died. We trained in basements to attract less attention. In the end, karate overcame ignorance. Today Russia has several major martial arts associations and federations. Russian karate practitioners successfully compete internationally and win medals. This is true of a foreign tradition borrowed from Japan. The same is true of the Russian teaching founded on Zen. When people come to Moscow to study hacking, will they trust our teaching if it is led by FSB agents? I very much doubt it.
Everything hidden eventually comes to light. My method is traditional. Students come to me to study, qualify as hackers, and then return home to protect their businesses, their families, and their countries. They do not attack their neighbours or engage in criminal activity; they serve their own communities using the skills they have acquired, as responsible citizens. But the FSB’s method is different – it turns law-abiding citizens into criminals, imprisons them in pre-trial detention centres on fabricated grounds, where young men and women who simply wanted to obey the law and master technology, to understand how computers work, are forced to spend every hour of every day among criminals, adapt to criminal hierarchies, and form questionable connections. Put a fresh cucumber into a jar of brine, and it too becomes pickled.
The teaching of Zen, the teaching of the Buddha, protects me from such a fate. But this trial demonstrates why the study of computers should not be based on such manipulation, not on turning people into criminals and then offering them protection or recruitment, but on allowing people to trust their teachers, trust their path, and remain free. Every teaching, including mine, is ultimately a teaching of freedom. Here they are trying to imprison me on entirely fabricated grounds.
In my publication I insulted no one. I showed respect to every side. My publication was motivated by compassion. It contained no claims about why those people in Kherson died, those whose fate concerned me, those for whom priests conducted funeral rites. That cannot be prohibited. It is tragic that people died, but the fact that there were bodies there is confirmed not only by what I personally saw on YouTube. It is also confirmed by publications from the Russian side. Those materials are part of the case file.
When I took my Buddhist vow, I vowed to speak the truth. Therefore, when people now claim on my behalf that I told lies, it is a profound challenge to me and to my tradition.
These past two years have been difficult for me. But if the court insists that I committed some crime, I will continue speaking the truth. We will continue appealing. We will seek my release. One thing I have been saying for these past 30 years is that freedom of speech is not someone’s invention. It is one of the foundations upon which something as remarkable as the internet was built. My generation and the generation before mine built this global network and brought it to Russia. The task of today’s generation is to preserve it. It is based precisely on people being honest with one another, being able to speak freely, express their thoughts, and share them, including on social media.
The fact that legislation has now developed in a direction contrary to freedom of speech has led to disruptions in the operation of the internet and banking systems. It is all connected because people are trying to destroy the very stone on which the internet rests. As a result, the unified network is breaking apart into countless small national networks. In one, criticism of one political leader is forbidden; in another, criticism of a different leader; in a third, yet another. But this fragmentation will not stop. Every smaller official will also want protection from criticism, and the process will continue. These small networks already exist. They exist inside corporations and inside various government, military, and security agencies.
Russia gains nothing by restricting freedom of speech. On the contrary, it destroys something valuable to all humanity, something that became possible only because humanity united when confronting its greatest enemies. It united around principles, among which freedom of speech is one of the most fundamental. I have often met students who failed to understand the importance of this. Someone insults them online, and they immediately seek revenge, becoming upset because not everyone on the internet likes them or praises them. Such conflicts are inevitable. There are only two ways to resolve them.
The first is self-improvement, so that everyone, including those with public authority or political power, understands that people online will say both good and bad things. And if they dislike hearing criticism, perhaps they should change their own behaviour. The second approach is to hunt down everyone who says something unpleasant, imprison them, and adopt laws such as Article 207.3.
People who spend enough time online usually come to understand this. They become less offended by criticism or even false statements about themselves and work on themselves instead. But now a generation has grown up that has never known any other Russia. I was born in the Soviet Union, educated there, lived through the 1990s, experienced Russia of the 2000s, the 2010s, and what is happening now. There are people born in the twenty-first century who think Russia has always been like this and who want to reshape everyone around them according to their mistaken understanding of reality.
The prosecution represents the security services and the executive branch of Russia. One might call them Mara’s army. They have a chain of command. Naturally, they dislike hearing criticism of their superiors. I never criticised their superiors. They simply want everyone to become like them. But religion in our country is separate from the state. My own hierarchy does not pass through any earthly ruler. There is absolutely no need to remake me into either a security officer or a criminal.
Perhaps it would be better to focus on improving yourselves, on ceasing to treat fellow citizens with different views and a different ideology in this way, people who follow the Buddha’s teaching with the same devotion that others reserve for political leaders. Yes, when someone enters monastic life, they may be choosing an alternative because they find something lacking in the world as it exists. But instead of joining one side in a conflict, killing people, or imprisoning people, they put on monastic robes, devote themselves to meditation, and study an ancient tradition, preparing for a time when the wisdom preserved through the centuries will once again be valued by their fellow citizens.
I consider imprisonment both useless and harmful. It even harms Russian industry. As I have already said, I was developing a calculator based on the one on which I myself learned in the 1980s, and many gifted programmers I know were educated using that calculator. I understand how the minds of children and teenagers learn the instruction set created in the Soviet Union, and I am able to improve that system so that today’s young people, studying what our predecessors created, can become even more talented hackers.
It may appear that support is now given not to domestic innovators, but only to those influenced by the FSB. But turning religion into a puppet theatre controlled by the security services would reduce Buddhism to little more than an FSB department for Buddhist affairs. I have met practitioners in our country who are afraid to follow the Buddha’s teaching wholeheartedly because they fear prison. There truly comes a point where one must decide how much to compromise with the surrounding world and how much to shave one’s head and follow one’s convictions.
For all these reasons, and given my determination to follow the Buddha’s path, whether this year or several years from now, I maintain that the punishment sought by the prosecution is excessive. I believe Russia will sooner or later return to the path it chose in 1946 by signing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and will stop punishing people for internet publications. Moreover, as my gift to Russian law enforcement, I would point out that skilled hackers are needed by prosecutors, investigators, and the courts. They can help protect computer systems from cyberattacks without becoming involved in political or international conflicts. Likewise, when people become accustomed to freedom of speech and communicate openly online, criminals may reveal their plans in advance, allowing investigators to prepare. When people speak honestly online, their views become visible. If you intimidate people–and Russians cannot be intimidated forever – there will eventually be consequences. When people openly express their beliefs and intentions, investigators gain more information about what is happening.
Freedom of speech benefits everyone, yet it has been unnaturally suppressed. Verdicts under this article will eventually be overturned. I hope that happens soon.
There is one more point. Even if a politician, a public figure, or a musician enjoys a 99 per cent approval rating – which in reality exists only because of falsification – that still means one million people in Russia oppose that person. Those one million people will continue expressing their views. Even if half of them are frightened into silence, there will still be five hundred thousand people speaking. Are we really going to imprison Russians on such a scale?
This raises another question: what are we bringing to the new territories that are being incorporated into Russia at such great human cost? People have different opinions about this, but Russia is expanding, and the question remains: what culture are we bringing there? My tradition and I insist that true greatness is achieved not through the force of arms, but through wisdom, the power of persuasion, personal example, and the culture that we possess and that I continue to develop in the field of advanced technologies. Russia needs that culture today.
Therefore, who initiated this case and for what purpose is not something I wish to dwell upon. Let specialists decide that. My task is to practise Zen Buddhism under whatever conditions my state provides. If you build a temple or monastery, I will practise there. If you send me to a detention centre or a penal colony, I will practise there. This is a very ancient practice – the practice of sitting. It was not created without reason. I prefer the path I bring to people–reaching higher understanding through the study of computers–but seated meditation is an honoured practice known to many.
Your Honour, I ask you to deliver an acquittal. Perhaps the first in Russia. And I hope others will follow, until people in Russia are no longer imprisoned for words and Russia protects the rights of Russian-speaking people not only beyond its borders but within them as well, including here in Moscow, my native city, which I love.
Thank you very much.
27 April 2026,
Preobrazhensky District Court, Moscow, Russia.
Source: Ilya Vasilyev’s support group.
More information: Memorial Political Prisoners Support Project.
Photo: Ilya Vasilyev’s support group.