The Final Statement

‘I am one of hundreds of citizens who have been deprived of many rights and freedoms by people who do not respect rights and freedoms and consider them to be foreign influence in our country. We believe that respect for human and civil rights and freedoms should be at the very heart and purpose of all government policy.’

Your Honour,

Everyone present in this courtroom has been brought together by Federal Law No. 255-FZ, ‘On Control over the Activities of Persons Under Foreign Influence’, adopted on 14 July 2022 and amended repeatedly since then–each time to make it more restrictive.

Today, this law is one of the most repressive laws in Russia. It suspends the application of Chapter Two of the Russian Constitution, ‘Human and Civil Rights and Freedoms’, to people included in the Ministry of Justice’s register.

The law defines a ‘foreign agent’ as ‘a person who has received support and (or) is subject to foreign influence in other forms and engages in activities of the types established by this same law’.

Under this law, foreign influence is defined as ‘the provision of support to a person by a foreign source and (or) the exertion of influence on a person, including through coercion, persuasion and (or) other means’.

The law defines such support as ‘the provision of funds and (or) other property to a person by a foreign source, as well as the provision by a foreign source of organisational and methodological assistance, scientific and technical assistance, or assistance in other forms’ (Part 2 of Article 2 of the law).

Of the ten types of foreign sources listed in the law, the tenth and final category is ‘persons who are under the influence of foreign sources’.

The circle is complete.

To be added to the ‘foreign agents’ register, it is enough to communicate publicly with someone who is already listed in the ‘foreign agents’ register.

What you actually do is now practically irrelevant, because under this law, any action a person takes in the public sphere concerning personal or public interests is deemed to be political activity.

The law establishes that political activity takes the following forms:

First, ‘participation in the organisation and conduct of public events in the form of assemblies, rallies, demonstrations, marches or pickets, or any combination thereof, as well as the organisation and conduct of public debates, discussions and speeches’.

Second, ‘participation in activities aimed at achieving a particular result in elections or a referendum; participation in election or referendum monitoring; participation in the formation of election commissions and referendum commissions; and participation in the activities of political parties’.

Third, ‘public appeals to public authorities and their officials, as well as other actions that influence the activities of these authorities and persons, including actions aimed at the adoption, amendment or repeal of laws or other regulatory legal acts’.

Fourth, ‘the dissemination, including through modern information technologies, of opinions on decisions made by public authorities and the policies they pursue’.

Fifth, ‘the formation of socio-political views and convictions, including through the conduct of public opinion polls and the publication of their results, or through other sociological research’.

Sixth, ‘the involvement of citizens, including minors, in the activities specified in paragraphs one through five of this part’.

Seventh, ‘the financing of the activities specified in paragraphs one through six of this part’.

In Russia, ‘foreign influence’ is now transmitted through airborne droplets and handshakes.

Today, any Russian citizen can be added to the ‘foreign agents’ register if, for political or personal reasons, they have fallen out of favour with the Russian authorities, an individual official or simply someone influential within the government.

Governors, members of parliament, senators, business rivals, propagandists, officials of every stripe and serial informants are lining up at the Ministry of Justice, demanding that this or that person be added to the ‘foreign agents’ register.

I am convinced that when the circumstances surrounding the inclusion of hundreds, and perhaps already thousands, of people in the ‘foreign agents’ register are brought to light–they are now being carefully concealed–we will witness a picture of monstrous corruption, both political and, in all likelihood, economic.

It is impossible to obtain the so-called ‘foreign agent’ case file in its entirety from the Ministry of Justice, even in court. The Ministry refuses to submit these documents to the court as well.

‘Would you like us to give you a tour of our offices, too?’ an official representing the Ministry of Justice asked me during a court hearing.

We do not need to enter other people’s offices. When we do walk through those offices, it will mean that the country’s policies have changed, the government has changed, human and civil rights and freedoms have been restored, rights and freedoms have been returned to society as a whole, justice has prevailed, the rule of law has been revived, the Constitution has been brought back to life, and the state serves the interests of its citizens. There is no doubt that this will happen.

Even in the atmosphere of unfreedom that prevails in our country, there are still people who publicly raise questions of fundamental importance to society and the state.

On 10 December 2025, at a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and members of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, council member and film director Alexander Sokurov addressed President Putin:

‘Every week, we anxiously watch to see who has once again been labelled a “foreign agent”. These designations are horrifying–horrifying when it is my fellow citizens who suddenly turn out to be “foreign agents”. I understand that this is a political category. Well, they simply gave it a name, somehow labelled a collection of grievances against a person, and that was it: the process began and kept going, further and further–until it became a person’s fate. And it is unclear what they are supposed to do next. In my view, this is the wrong decision, one that humiliates a person and a citizen, depriving them of the opportunity to develop and continue to exist. This is absolutely obvious to me.’

Vladimir Putin replied to Alexander Sokurov:

‘I know your position on this law on “foreign agents”, but we did not invent it. It was introduced in the United States back in the 1940s. We did not come up with it. There, violating this law can lead to imprisonment, whereas we have no such provision. Essentially, we have just one main requirement: show us your sources of funding. What is so terrible about that? I do not think there is anything particularly terrible about it. Although we have returned to this issue many times. Nobody should be getting carried away, that much is obvious. You are also right about this: we should not be swinging this “sword” indiscriminately in every direction. Everything must be approached with careful consideration, prudence and without any violations.’

Vladimir Putin told Alexander Sokurov that in Russia, a ‘foreign agent’ does not face imprisonment for violating the law on ‘foreign agents’. This is not true: under Article 330.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, a person can be sentenced to up to two years in prison. But that is not all–the situation has gone considerably further.

I am brought from prison to a hearing before a court of appeal to consider the appeal against my sentence filed by me and my defence lawyers, even though the sentence itself does not involve imprisonment.

On 5 December 2025, I was remanded in custody in connection with a different criminal case in which no criminal offence had occurred and which had itself been initiated by an authority not legally empowered to do so. To justify the need to detain me–without proof of guilt and before a verdict had been delivered–the investigators asked the court to impose the strictest possible preventive measure, claiming that I might abscond from the investigation and the court because, and I quote, ‘L. M. Shlosberg is included in the “foreign agents” register; according to the investigation, he has connections abroad and is under the foreign influence of foreign sources’.

My defence lawyers have informed me that this is the first case in the Russian Federation in which a person’s forcibly imposed ‘foreign agent’ status has been cited by courts as grounds for keeping an unconvicted person in prison–before guilt has been established and before a verdict has been delivered–in connection with an accusation of a non-violent offence.

Such grounds for remanding someone in custody or extending their detention are not provided for in the Code of Criminal Procedure. Before my case, they had no precedent in Russian judicial practice either.

‘Foreign agent’ status is not an aggravating circumstance under the Criminal Code. Yet since 5 December 2025, judges of the Pskov City Court have cited it in their rulings three times, judges of the criminal division of the Pskov Regional Court of Appeal have done so another three times, and judges of the Third Court of Cassation of General Jurisdiction have done so twice.

Where the first act of lawlessness occurs, a second, a third and a thousandth will inevitably follow. It is lawlessness that spreads through airborne droplets. And then the plague of lawlessness begins.

President Vladimir Putin told Alexander Sokurov: ‘Essentially, we have just one main requirement: show us your sources of funding. What is so terrible about that?’ But under the law currently in force, since 2022, foreign funding has not been required for a person to be added to the ‘foreign agents’ register.

Among the documents the Ministry of Justice submitted to the court in 2023 is a document confirming that I had received no foreign funding in any form. This did not prevent the Ministry from adding me to the register.

As part of the new criminal proceedings, the Federal Financial Monitoring Service examined all my sources of assets and income and established that I had received no foreign funding. What difference did this make? None whatsoever.

Over the ten years from 2012 to 2022, the law on ‘foreign influence’ evolved from a law intended to combat foreign funding of political and public activities into a law aimed at combating citizens who openly exercise their constitutional right to freedom of thought and speech and to express their opinions and convictions.

As a result of being added to the ‘foreign agents’ register, a person is deprived of nearly twenty fundamental constitutional rights and freedoms:

  • The right to the state’s guarantee of equality before the law and the courts (Article 19 of the Constitution);
  • The right to protection of personal dignity (Article 21 of the Constitution);
  • The right to privacy (Article 23 of the Constitution);
  • The right to protection of one’s honour and good name (Article 23 of the Constitution);
  • The right to choose one’s beliefs freely (Article 28 of the Constitution);
  • The right to act in accordance with one’s beliefs (Article 28 of the Constitution);
  • The right to freely produce, transmit and disseminate information (Article 29 of the Constitution);
  • The right to freely associate with other citizens (Article 30 of the Constitution);
  • The right to participate freely in peaceful assemblies (Article 31 of the Constitution);
  • The right to vote and stand for election, and to participate in the preparation and conduct of elections and referendums (Article 32 of the Constitution);
  • The right of equal access to public service (Article 32 of the Constitution);
  • The right to participate in the governance of the state (Article 32 of the Constitution);
  • The right to freely use one’s abilities and property for entrepreneurial and other economic activities not prohibited by law (Article 34 of the Constitution);
  • The right to have private property protected by law (Article 35 of the Constitution);
  • The right to freely dispose of one’s ability to work and to choose one’s occupation and profession (Article 37 of the Constitution);
  • The right to receive state support (Article 39 of the Constitution);
  • The right to freedom of literary, artistic, scientific, technical and other forms of creative activity, and of teaching (Article 44 of the Constitution).

In essence, the law on ‘foreign influence’ has become an instrument for depriving Russian citizens of their Russian citizenship rights without a judicial process.

Under Part 2 of Article 17 of the Constitution, fundamental human rights and freedoms are inalienable and belong to everyone from birth. Yet the law on ‘foreign influence’ strips people of their fundamental human and civil rights.

Under Part 2 of Article 55 of the Constitution, laws that abolish or diminish human and civil rights and freedoms must not be enacted in the Russian Federation. Yet the law on ‘foreign influence’ abolishes and diminishes human and civil rights and freedoms.

Under Part 3 of Article 56 of the Constitution, even in a state of emergency, certain rights and freedoms may not be restricted, even to ensure citizens’ security and protect the constitutional order. These include the rights and freedoms provided for in Articles 20, 21, 23 (Part 1), 24, 28, 34 (Part 1), 40 (Part 1) and 46–54 of the Constitution. Nearly half of the rights protected by these articles have not merely been restricted but abolished by the law on ‘foreign influence’.

As a result of this law’s application, a person ceases to exist as a subject of law.

In essence, a person included in the ‘foreign agents’ register is left with only the right to life. And, evidently, in the view of the law’s authors and those who enforce it, that life is supposed to be lived without rights, with one’s dignity humiliated, unable to defend one’s honour and good name in court, freely exercise one’s abilities or act according to one’s convictions.

The very premise of the law on ‘foreign influence’ lies beyond the boundaries of the Russian Constitution.

The Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation could and should have protected Russian citizens against violations of their rights and freedoms. On 6 November 2025, having exhausted all prior avenues of judicial protection, Boris Vishnevsky and I lodged a complaint with the Constitutional Court alleging that the law on ‘foreign influence’ violated the constitutional rights and freedoms of Russian citizens. My defence lawyer, Vitaly Isakov, drafted our complaint.

On 25 December 2025, the Russian Constitutional Court refused to admit the complaint for consideration. It issued a brief ruling of fewer than five pages, failing to answer a single one of the questions put before the highest court in our 27-page submission. Instead, it stated that, in the court’s view, ‘the federal legislature is not precluded from resorting to evaluative or generally accepted concepts, provided that the meaning of such concepts is accessible to and understandable by the parties to the relevant legal relations’.

We know all too well from twentieth-century Russian history what this ‘evaluative or generally accepted concept’ is: ‘enemy of the people’. Its dark shadow looms behind the phrase ‘foreign agent’. Both the authors of this law and those who enforce it understand this perfectly well. That was the intention all along.

Foreign–alien, dangerous, hostile, harbouring a threat, someone to be driven out of the country and, at the very least, politically eliminated.

Article 18 of the Russian Constitution concerns ‘Human and Civil Rights and Freedoms’. It states that these rights and freedoms are directly applicable. They determine the meaning, content and application of laws, the activities of the legislative and executive branches of government and local self-government, and are guaranteed by the administration of justice. This article, too, has fallen victim to the law on ‘foreign influence’.

If Osip Mandelstam, Isaac Babel, Boris Pilnyak, Daniil Kharms, Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, Lev Gumilyov, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Lev Razgon, Oleg Volkov, Yury Dombrovsky, Sergei Dovlatov, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky, Nikolai Zhilyayev, Vsevolod Zaderatsky, Alexander Mosolov, Dmitri Shostakovich, Solomon Mikhoels, Nikolai Vavilov, Pavel Florensky, Nikolai Kondratyev, Lev Karsavin, Matvei Bronstein, Sergei Korolev, Andrei Tupolev, Dmitry Likhachev, Alexei Losev, Lev Landau, Metropolitan Veniamin (Kazansky), Metropolitan Peter (Polyansky), Archbishop Hilarion (Troitsky), Metropolitan Kirill (Smirnov), Archbishop Luke (Voyno-Yasenetsky), Archbishop Afanasy (Sakharov), Valentin Sventitsky, Anatoly Marchenko, Yury Galanskov, Andrei Sakharov, Elena Bonner, Vladimir Bukovsky, Yury Orlov, Natan Sharansky, Sergei Kovalev, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Vadim Delone, Konstantin Babitsky, Tatyana Baeva, Larisa Bogoraz, Vladimir Dremlyuga, Pavel Litvinov, Viktor Fainberg and thousands upon thousands of others who fell victim to the machinery of political repression were alive in Russia today, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, they too would be added to the ‘foreign agents’ register.

‘At least we are not shooting you like they did in 1937. We are only depriving you of your rights,’ supporters of the law on ‘foreign influence’ tell us.

Apparently, these gentlemen assume that we should be grateful to them for that. Such is the state’s current conception of the fate awaiting a person in Russia.

Not a single court ruling concerning ‘foreign agents’ identifies the foreign state on whose behalf the ‘foreign agent’ is supposedly acting. There are 193 UN member states, yet none has been identified. How can this be? There is a ‘foreign agent’, but no foreign state. So whose interests is this ‘foreign agent’ serving?

We understand which foreign state was meant when the law on ‘foreign influence’ was conceived. That state is FREEDOM. Freedom of thought. Freedom of speech. Freedom of belief. Freedom of action. Freedom of choice. This is what they want to portray as foreign influence in our country–freedom.

Russian society is being urged to believe that freedom is alien and undesirable, dangerous and unacceptable for Russia.

This intention denies the entire history of Russian free thought, dating back to the early Middle Ages. It denies the whole of Russian culture, with its yearning for freedom, compassion for human beings and respect for human dignity.

It denies the veche-governed republics of Pskov and Novgorod, the Church of the Non-Possessors, Archpriest Avvakum, and the reforms of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. It denies the ideas and work of Alexei Kurbatov, Ivan Pososhkov, Dmitry Golitsyn and Heinrich Fick.

It denies the plans of Alexander I and his associates Viktor Kochubey, Nikolay Novosiltsev, Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, Pavel Stroganov and Mikhail Speransky. Even under Nicholas I, Pavel Kiselyov and Yegor Kankrin continued their work, as did Mikhail Speransky.

The claim that freedom is alien and hostile to Russia is refuted by Alexander II and his Great Reforms. These included the zemstvo and judicial reforms, which helped establish Russia’s international standing, as well as university, municipal and military reforms and, first and foremost, the abolition of serfdom.

The reforms carried out under Alexander II, their supreme initiator and political guarantor, were developed by Nikolay Milyutin, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, Dmitry Milyutin, Mikhail Reutern, Alexander Golovnin, Yakov Rostovtsev, Konstantin Kavelin, Boris Chicherin and Mikhail Loris-Melikov.

The culmination of Alexander II’s Great Reforms was to have been a reform of the highest levels of government, known as the ‘Loris-Melikov Constitution’. His ‘Report on Involving Representatives of the Population in Legislative Consultations’ was approved by Alexander II in February 1881, but was never implemented because the emperor was assassinated on 1 March 1881.

The terrorists who killed Alexander II were later elevated to the pantheon of heroes by the Bolsheviks. Had the Great Reforms been fully implemented and completed, the Bolsheviks would not have come to power in Russia, and the nationwide tragedy of 1917 would never have occurred. The entire twentieth century in our country might have unfolded differently. Millions of people would have remained alive.

Under Nicholas II, several attempts were made to liberalise and modernise Russia, most notably through the reforms of Sergei Witte and Pyotr Stolypin. They tried to pull Russia back from the vortex of the approaching revolution, but failed. The failure to carry out crucial political, economic and administrative reforms in time, together with Russia’s participation in the First World War, paved the way for a national catastrophe.

It was the Bolsheviks, who came to power on the bloodshed of the First World War, who carried out a coup, unleashed the Civil War and divided society into their own and outsiders, servants of the regime and ‘enemies of the people’.

It was in those fateful decades of the 1920s and 1930s that the seed of the law on ‘foreign influence’ was planted, when criminal cases were brought against alleged English, German and Polish ‘spies’. It later emerged that there had been no spies. There had been only a fanatical hatred of people with different convictions, a hatred bordering on schizophrenia.

Everyone chooses for themselves whose political heir they wish to be.

The law on ‘foreign influence’ is a blatant demonstration of contempt for the courts. Contempt for the courts is built into the very concept of this law.

People are added to the ‘foreign agents’ register secretly, through an extrajudicial process. We are deprived of some twenty inalienable constitutional rights and freedoms by decisions made by officials of an executive authority, decisions prepared in secret, behind our backs, at their own arbitrary discretion.

Adding a person to the ‘foreign agents’ register is designed as an act of arbitrariness and carried out as one.

To label someone a ‘foreign agent’, no particular act or offence needs to have been committed. The basis for depriving a person of their rights is the purely ideological discretion of an executive official. This violates the fundamental legal principle that no one should be held liable in the absence of a specific act, without guilt and without evidence. The provisions of the law on ‘foreign influence’ establish an offence with an open-ended definition but impose the harshest possible penalty: the complete deprivation of personal, political, economic and cultural rights for an indefinite period.

The deliberately fabricated notion of ‘foreign influence’ is determined at the discretion of ministry officials whose names are concealed behind the signature of a deputy minister of justice. The law on ‘foreign influence’ has turned the Ministry of Justice into a ministry of injustice.

Through the provisions of the law on ‘foreign influence’ and the actions taken by officials under it against citizens targeted by these measures, the application of Chapter Two of the Constitution of the Russian Federation is suspended without judicial proceedings.

Who can put an end to the denial of rights, arbitrariness and lawlessness?

Only the courts.

Under the Constitution, judges are independent and subject only to the Constitution of the Russian Federation and federal law (Part 1 of Article 120).

Judges hold office on a permanent basis (Part 1 of Article 121).

Judges enjoy immunity (Part 1 of Article 122).

The judiciary is the highest authority. A state may experience a complete paralysis of its executive and legislative institutions, with human and civil rights and freedoms driven underground and society frozen in fear.

The courts can bring everything back to life.

A court can make a parliament function as a parliament, a government as a government, and a prosecutor’s office as a prosecutor’s office. A court can revive and protect human rights and freedoms, give a second wind to the exhausted, inspire the disillusioned, restore meaning to fundamental concepts and reinstate the Russian Constitution as a living instrument for every Russian citizen. All arbitrariness, all denial of rights and all lawlessness end where an honest court begins.

Those who perpetuate the denial of rights and lawlessness have become what they are not only because of their innate or acquired qualities, but also because the courts have allowed them to become so.

Only in the absence of justice can a person participating in court proceedings fail to understand who is making decisions in the name of the Russian Federation–the person in the black robe, the person in the blue uniform, or someone who is not even present in the courtroom. The destruction of the courts is equivalent to the destruction of the state.

The restoration of human rights and freedoms in the country requires nothing more than an independent judiciary. Everyone will see that rights and freedoms are real because the courts exist to uphold them.

The court is the last bastion protecting human rights and freedoms and the first step towards restoring them.

The road from unfreedom to freedom runs through the revival of the judiciary.

Throughout dozens of hearings in the court of first instance and the court of appeal, the state prosecutor tried to portray the prosecution as defending the Russian state and its interests in these proceedings. No. It is my valiant defence lawyers and I who are defending the Russian state and its interests in this case–the interests enshrined in the Russian Constitution, embodied in both its letter and its spirit.

This has happened before in history: defendants, accused persons and convicts have defended the law while prosecutors have destroyed it. Sadly, this is nothing new in our country. The time has come to revisit these lessons–historical, legal and political.

Your Honour,

You are hearing a case whose central issue is human rights and freedoms. Not mine alone.

I am one of hundreds of citizens who have been deprived of many rights and freedoms by people who do not respect rights and freedoms and regard them as foreign influence in our country. We believe that respect for human and civil rights and freedoms should be at the very heart and purpose of all government policy.

For this to happen in our country, justice must be done. To begin with, in one specific case. Let me remind everyone that Pskov is a city of Russian freedom. It would be fitting for the revival of justice in Russia to begin in Pskov.

We all know how periods of unfreedom end. With freedom.

Establishing institutions that uphold human and civil rights and freedoms in our country is not merely a matter of protecting human dignity through the state. It is a matter of preserving Russia as a state. Without freedom, a country cannot survive, just as a person cannot survive without oxygen.

Today’s denial, diminution, restriction and abolition of human rights and freedoms, and the attempts to suffocate freedom itself, amount to the suffocation of the future of tens of millions of people and the destruction of tens of millions of lives that would have unfolded differently under freedom than under unfreedom. Establishing freedom is a matter of life and death for those living today and those yet to be born.

When freedom becomes a ‘foreign agent’, a country loses its footing, and the state’s activities lose their central purpose: serving people and creating the conditions in which their rights and freedoms can be realised. When freedom becomes a ‘foreign agent’, a country becomes foreign to its own citizens. Not even a stepmother, but a prison warden.

History has repeatedly shown and proved, in Russia and elsewhere, that freedom is inevitable. But the question of the price of freedom always arises. The question of lives lost. Of lives destroyed. Of people unlawfully deprived of their liberty. Of life paths twisted and cut short.

The price of freedom is never abstract. It is always measured in human lives. One human life is one indivisible unit of freedom.

This is the necessary and sufficient condition for defending, protecting and nurturing freedom.

To reach freedom, we must endure the ordeal of unfreedom. There is no way around it. We face this ordeal every day. Every one of us.

It is deeply painful to watch people being stripped of their freedom at the roots. And yet it is profoundly heartening to understand that freedom cannot be uprooted. There will always be three hundred Spartans who refuse to surrender it, even if they are labelled ‘foreign agents’.

Where does our hope lie today?

In the fact that freedom cannot be destroyed.

In the fact that light cannot be killed.

In the fact that goodness triumphs even when it perishes, because, under the law of the conservation of goodness, it will inevitably find someone in whom to take root.

The word of freedom is never the last word.

22 April 2026
Pskov City Court, Pskov, Russia.
Source: Novaya Gazeta.
Read more: Memorial. PZK.
Photo: Echo of Pskov