I want to say, my dear court, that your king is naked. And it is no longer just one little boy crying this out — millions of people are crying it out, because it is completely obvious. Twenty years of inept rule have led to this result. He has that crown slipping down over his ears. There are lies on television. And we have spent trillions of dollars from the sale of oil and gas, while our country continues to fall behind and degrade with every passing year. It is no surprise that economists of Russian origin are joining together and writing that the past years should be called lost decades. And in truth, I do not need any economists to understand this, just like everyone else does not need them either. I am sitting in a penal colony in the regional capital of Vladimir, which is 200 km (124 miles) from Moscow. There is not a single decent smooth road here, salaries here are 30,000 rubles a month! And this is the 21st century, in an oil-and-gas country that claims to be a global leader. And your naked, thieving king wants to go on ruling to the very end. He does not care about the country at all. He has latched onto it and wants to hold this power forever. But if he does keep ruling, then the lost decade will be followed by a stolen decade. And because this is clear to everyone, and more and more people can see that the king is naked, this naked king realizes that there is nothing he can do. He can do nothing to make the country live better. And so he frantically searches for, you know, little scraps of holiness, little scraps of something good, so that he can appropriate them and steal them. Appropriate them and use them for his personal purposes. And for many years now he has been doing this with our people’s victory in the Great Patriotic War (the Soviet-German front of World War II). He is trying to appropriate it for himself, declaring that it was practically he who won that war, and he trades on it left and right. And this trial is about exactly that: how your naked king stole the Banner of Victory and is trying to turn it into a thong for himself. But in essence, all your power is the power of those very occupiers and traitors. I consider all of you traitors. Led by your naked king, you are carrying out exactly the plan we all read about in history textbooks: that Russia should be conquered, and Russians turned into slaves whose wealth would be taken away. Who would be deprived of education, deprived of healthcare, deprived of any prospects whatsoever. That is exactly what you have done — you have carried out that plan. Every year, 200,000 people leave the country. Our population is now shrinking by the millions. Stop interrupting me! This is my final statement. It is directly relevant to the case materials. Because the materials of this case perfectly reveal the essence of your power. And what is happening right now, when the Moscow prosecutor — a man I personally investigated, his villas in Spain and hotels in Montenegro. I rented a room in his hotel in Montenegro. And this prosecutor, this state official, stealing millions here and investing abroad, is trying in a closed trial to declare me and people like me — patriots of this country, defending our country from you, the traitors — extremists and foreign agents. I want to say that no matter how you hide behind this, no matter how you try to steal this sacred thing and drag the Banner of Victory out of the museum and use it for yourselves, you will fail. Your occupation regime will be removed sooner or later... Your Honor, stop interrupting me. I understand why you are interrupting me: you know that all of this is true. And I am being very kind to you, considering that, as I repeat, I regard all of you as traitors and an occupation regime. But Russia has many times been targeted by some occupying power, some occupation administration. And yours has been fairly successful, because for 20 years you have managed to rob our people living in this country, deprive them of their future, and ship their wealth abroad. But sooner or later, this will end. That is all!