Mr. Wrzesnewskyj, thank you for bringing focus to this issue.

While our main topic of discussion today is political prisoners, I think it's important to remember that there is a price even higher than long-term imprisonment to be paid by people who dare to stand up for truth and justice in Russia and who dare to stand up against the Putin regime.

Boris Nemtsov, who was a dear and close friend of mine and who was the most prominent, the most effective and the most powerful leader of the Russian democratic opposition, paid that price on the evening of February 27, 2015, when he was gunned down on the bridge literally in front of the Kremlin.

What we have been seeing in these nearly four and a half years that have passed since that wretched night is a top-level cover-up orchestrated by the Putin regime in relation to those who had organized and masterminded this assassination, the most high-profile political assassination in the modern history of Russia. Beyond the immediate perpetrators who were arrested and sentenced to prison, nobody else has faced any sort of accountability or justice.

The man I referred to a few minutes ago, Russian interior ministry Major Ruslan Geremeyev, is a key enforcer and key handler for Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-appointed leader in Chechnya. On two different occasions, Russian investigators have tried to indict him as an organizer in the assassination because there was more than enough evidence, and on both of those occasions General Alexander Bastrykin, whom I referred to earlier, the chief of the Russian investigative committee, personally intervened to ban investigators from doing so.

One of the most astonishing things about the Nemtsov case is that we pretty much know the name of every single person who has been involved in the assassination, at least to a certain level; I am convinced that it goes higher. At least to a certain very high level, we know those names, and those names have been voiced during the investigation and trial.

The lawyers representing the Nemtsov family and Zhanna Nemtsova, whom you know personally, Mr. Nemtsov's daughter, have repeatedly intervened to get the Russian authorities to question these people. Every single time, their appeals were rejected. Key evidence was withheld. Key persons of interest were not questioned.

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