What is the purpose of the law for a person?

The law is needed to protect the weak from the encroachments of the strong, and to shield the strong from the temptation to prey on the weak. The law is necessary to punish the criminal and to prevent new crimes. To weed out the worst in a person and allow the best to flourish.

There is nothing more important and precious than your life. Your life belongs only to you and no one else. No one has the right to take it from you. No one has the right to destroy those you love. And no one has the right to order you to kill an innocent person.

If a law is passed that obliges me to kill innocents, it is my duty to break that law. If a law is passed that obliges me to cover up the murders of innocents, I must break that law too. If a law is passed that forbids speaking the truth about others killing innocents, no one is obliged to obey such a law.

It does not matter if the murderers are soldiers of our country. It does not matter if they were following the orders of their commanders or the commander-in-chief. A soldier who kills an innocent is a criminal, and he is more terrifying than an ordinary criminal because behind him stands a huge organized force that the victim cannot resist.

Why is there an article in the Criminal Code about "Dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation"?

To ban speaking the truth about the murders and atrocities committed by our soldiers on Ukrainian soil. About torture, rapes, extrajudicial executions. These tortures and rapes are documented. Bodies—with hands tied behind their backs with white ribbons, which Russian soldiers ordered Ukrainian civilians to wear—have been exhumed. These are facts. This has already happened. The truth cannot be banned. One can only try to hide it to continue killing, torturing, and raping with impunity.

Nothing more destructive and dehumanizing has happened to Russia in a long time than the war against Ukraine. My country invaded the territory of a neighboring country, which was once a brotherly nation, without cause or reason. It sent tanks to capture the capital of Ukraine. It sent planes to bomb its cities. It has destroyed countless human lives. It has razed dozens of settlements to the ground. In violation of international law, it has seized and declared Ukrainian lands as its own.

This war cannot be justified by anything. Its horror and senselessness are too obvious. But the people who ordered it to start—Vladimir Putin and his closest circle—cannot retreat. Because, by all human laws, they are the real criminals here, and because they fear being punished for their crime.

But in Russia today, power is in the hands of force. In Russia today, force breaks people's backs, force bends the law, extracting from the courts the right to continue breaking the backs of the weak, to continue bending the laws to suit themselves. Therefore, in Russia, inhumane laws are being passed.

To forbid calling the war a war, and to order it to be called a special military operation—so as not to account to others or to our own for how many Ukrainians have been killed for nothing, how many Russian soldiers have been laid down in vain. To silence those who dare to mention it. To sentence them to ten years in prison, to sentence them to fifteen years in prison.

To forbid calling the truth the truth, and lies—lies. To introduce this definition into the very name of the law, demanding that proven facts be called "deliberately false information." To permit the killing of innocents. To order their cover-up. To abolish retribution for criminals. To encourage them to new murders.

The authorities force us in a very short time to believe that unimaginable evil is normal and desirable. They force us to abandon the basic moral principles that our father and mother instill in each of us from childhood. They accustom us to lies and to killings.

The ban on speaking the truth aloud and the demand to publicly declare lies have a purpose. This purpose is to destroy the self-respect of the new generation of Russians. To break their human backbone, to spit on themselves out of fear of unjust punishment, to personally trample on their moral foundation, the natural understanding of what human law is.

Nothing more destructive and dehumanizing has happened to Russia in a long time than the war against Ukraine. Failing to dehumanize Ukrainians, the Russian authorities are dehumanizing their own citizens. And while the destruction in Ukraine is visible to the naked eye, visible even from space—the destructive processes that the Russian authorities have now launched in the people's soul, in the fabric of our society, though they are still invisible, threaten the very existence of Russia.

To preserve themselves today, the Russian authorities are destroying the wonderful, flourishing Ukraine and destroying Russia, my homeland. I cannot prevent this, but I cannot remain silent about it.

I am convinced that I am speaking the truth by exposing the crimes of the Russian army in Ukraine. I am convinced that the Ministry of Defense and the supreme leadership of the Russian Federation have lied and are lying to justify this monstrous, senseless war. I am convinced that it is not I who am committing a crime against Russia and its future, but they are.

There are laws that no one should obey. And I will not obey them.