Thank you, sir and dear madams and sirs. I am very honoured to be invited to the committee to give a statement on Russian influence in allied countries.

I will focus my time on transnational repression, targeting people from Nordic countries who are in EU and NATO countries. These are people who have been exposing Russian influence work. Among them are journalists, researchers and civil servants.

My personal experience started in 2015, when I wrote about Russian information warfare as an opinion writer for a green, liberal, centrist, regional Swedish newspaper. Since then, I have received phone calls with demands that I stop writing because I am about to cause a nuclear war. I have regularly been accused of being a racist, mentally sick and a very despicable person, and I have received several death threats online. I have been physically intimidated in a public place by the pro-Russian, Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement. By the way, it is classified in the U.S. as a terror group.

I have been smeared and wrongly accused of being a convicted pedophile in a Facebook group very close to the Russian embassy in Sweden. It was a campaign in which an alternative media editor-in-chief took part. He was prohibited from entering the Swedish parliament due to contacts with Russian intelligence. He repeated it and gave it a larger reach to the extent that I have also been harassed in person about this accusation outside my part-time workplace, the Swedish Defence University in Stockholm. That was by a student at the university who has a background in the alternative right movement.

These are just some brief examples of what has happened over the last decade, and is still happening. Of course, they have had consequences for me and my family, as we now live with our addresses and public registers protected in Sweden.

However, here is the clue. I am not the story. I am here as just an example of the story. The story is how Russia tries to scare those who expose Kremlin operations to the public.

If we widen the scope, here are some more things that we know have happened to Nordic citizens in EU and NATO countries. These are citizens who work as journalists, experts or public servants.

We have cases of home visits. People leave traces in your home, like an unflushed number two in the toilet, so you can see that someone has been there. Feel the stress and insecurity of what that means. Imagine that happening in your home.

There have been cyber-attacks against individuals, infiltration of workplaces with an insider giving Russian operatives data on a person's travel and whereabouts, nameless demonstrations and mass reporting to media or researcher ethics boards targeting an individual person, and digital and physical harassment up to the level of the demonstration of the capability to kill someone, such as a drive-by shooting with a water gun in a central European capital.

All these methods have resulted in self-censorship and a delayed understanding of the threat. One public example is Swedish political scientists not daring to sign a public debate article in a Swedish paper in support of one of their targeted colleagues because they were afraid that they would receive similar treatment.

The aim of these methods is to paralyze or fragment a hostile person. This is how the East German Stasi defined these methods back in the 1980s. They have real, long-term effects on the targets, like stress-related diseases, mental strain and a lack of understanding from their surroundings, like workplaces and the public sphere.

It has been a long time since Russia threw out the rule book, and we are now heading to a more critical situation in relation to Russia. In the year ahead and the years to come, Russia will deploy any means below article 5 to frighten and split our societies so that Russia can achieve its imperial goals. These are threats to peace, stability and national security, both in the Nordic countries and in Canada.

Thank you for listening. I am happy to take your questions.