I’ve just read yet another political analysis claiming that “the Kremlin would like to hold the election calmly—without scandals or fraud, and relatively honestly.”
And then Volkov messages me: the convoy has arrived, and even an AMR-plated car from the presidential envoy’s office has shown up—to watch. That means they’re going to lock me up.
And a minute later, not from Volkov but from our lawyer, I learn that Leonid has been jailed for 30 days.
The Nizhny Novgorod judge kept endlessly postponing hearings in his completely fabricated case over an entirely lawful rally in Nizhny Novgorod, holding no fewer than 7 (seven) hearings, and we understood exactly why: public support for our campaign frightens these Kremlin ghouls so much that they would try to isolate Volkov during the most crucial period.
(A detailed explanation of why Volkov is 100% innocent can be found here).
It is in December that we hold the organizationally very complex meeting of the initiative group for the nomination. December also brings very large expenses for the final preparations for the signature-collection process. We are gathering key documents right now, and so on.
And we are doing all of this. And we will get it done. And you are funding all of it, because this is our shared election campaign.
The signatures are coming in, the verifications are moving forward, and the number of volunteers is growing.
Putin and the rest of the Kremlin thieves have none of this. No volunteers, no voluntary donations. Just Sardilenovich and state budget money, which they treat as if it were their own.
And all day long they think about how to stop us, block us, keep us off the ballot. And then they can run their own “calm, relatively honest campaign” in our absence and with those “opponents” they themselves invited into the election.
They raid our campaign offices—we keep working. They intimidate volunteers—we keep working. They try to stop us from raising money—we keep working. And a huge share of the credit for that belongs to Volkov, the man running this entire large machine.
So they need to lock him up for a month, to make everything as difficult as possible that way too. Volkov is also the director of the foundation through which we sign all contracts and make all payments. Putin very much wants to bleed our campaign dry, to deprive it of money.
Well then. I won’t lie: although we had prepared for this turn of events, Leonid’s arrest for the entire most important period of the campaign, right as the election is officially being announced, is a serious blow, a serious obstacle to our work. We will have to work even harder, and it will be more difficult for us.
But Putin and all the Kremlin riffraff should not get their hopes up—this will not stop us, and it will not become a fatal obstacle for the campaign.
We are counting on your support at this moment, financial support above all, because right now we need to get through this transition period with interruptions in funding.
We’ll get through this—we knew who we were dealing with.
I wish Leonid strength. And I’m sending support to his family and especially to baby Mark Leonidovich Volkov, who is still younger than his father’s jail term.