I became a political activist back in college. I participated in almost all anti-government demonstrations since 2010. I volunteered for Alexey Navalny's mayor campaign in 2013 and his presidential campaign in 2018. I donated money to his Anti-Corruption Foundation which investigated and exposed crimes committed by the senior Russian government officials, including Medvedev and Putin himself. Now this foundation is proclaimed as a "terrorist organization" and because of that, according to a new law I'm currently prohibited from participating in any kind of elections for the next 3 years. I was beaten up by the police and arrested multiple times. I had high ranked police officers showing up at my door asking me to testify in court against Navalny and making vague threats to me after I refused to do that. Just this Saturday I was detained again for participating in the anti-war demonstration and yet I still continue to go to the streets of Moscow every evening doing just the same. And now from your email I found out that apparently all that time I was an accomplice to Putin's regime!

Please allow me to paint you a bigger picture. Putin didn't become a cruel crazy dictator just a week ago. He has always been like that and there is a reason why I joined the opposition movement more than 12 years ago. He was killing people, rigging elections, and stealing an enormous amount of money for himself and his friends through all these years. And through all these years no one cared about this except for the Russian opposition and people like me. He rigged the elections for his party and then made the police forces to brutally beat up the protesters and yet Russia still was a member of the G8 and all European leaders were meeting with him and treating him as an equal. He was destroying all independent media in the country and there were no sanctions nor protests overseas over that. The anchor on the state-owned TV-network was calling Ukraine "not a real state" long before the annexation of Crimea and yet that anchor was enjoying his villa in Italy. The state prosecutor of Russia was fabricating charges against opposition leaders while having an active residence permit in the Czech Republic and a penthouse in Prague. Even after the annexation of Crimea there were zero repercussions for Putin's oligarchs that own a ridiculous amount of real estate in London. In fact the entire world watched how the football club Chelsea was crowned champions. The club that is owned by Abramovich, one of the main Putin's cronies.

Through all these years there was zero help that the Russian opposition were able to get from any European government. There was no support from people of European countries. There were no protests in London after Nemtsov was murdered. There were no demonstrations in Berlin after Navalny was arrested. No people in Paris asked their government to not recognize the results of clearly rigged elections in Russia. And now after all those years the organized opposition movement in Russia is simply destroyed. Almost none of the independent media exist anymore. Nemtsov is dead, Navalny is in prison, Kasparov, Volkov, Sobol and many others had to flee the country. So why don't you want to punish the people from European countries that allowed this to happen? Why don't you terminate services with French citizens who didn't care, who didn't pressure their government to do anything about Putin through all those years and didn't elect anyone who was able to stand up to him? They're to blame for this war just as much as most of the Russian citizens and certainly more than I am.

I had a chance to emigrate from Russia into the US. I was working for a fin-tech startup from New York and they were asking me to move there. And the reason why I didn't do that is because I was inspired by Navalny and his stance that we shouldn't be afraid and we shouldn't just give up and leave the country to Putin and his friends. So I stayed because I didn't want to feel like a coward in emigration and I continued to do everything I could to fight the current regime in Russia. And now instead of providing any kind of support you're punishing me for this. I would really like to understand why do you think that I should be punished by you for this war. What did you do to prevent it that I didn't? Can I ask you what exactly did I do wrong and what specifically are you blaming me for? Was it wrong of me to simply be born in Russia? Is this something that I should've avoided somehow in your opinion? Or was it wrong of me not to run away when I had a chance and stay here to continue being in opposition to Putin?