"I am basically being hunted — if I leave the country I will definitely get caught. They [DOJ] are actively pursuing a criminal case and an arrest warrant for me in Spain because not all countries have extradition agreements with the US," Ionov said.
He added that Washington wants to isolate him completely.
"In this way, they are trying to prevent me from going abroad to engage with political groups around the world. In other words, their goal is to completely isolate me," Ionov said.
The activist added that he is also under criminal investigation by Ukrainian authorities and has received death threats from Ukrainians over his position on Russia's special military operation in Ukraine.
"Of course I take security precautions whenever I can. But I am not an official, the Federal Protective Service or the Interior Ministry [of Russia] do not protect me," he said.
The 33-year-old founder of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR) faces up to five years in a US prison if found guilty. He has denied the DOJ's allegations that he conducted a foreign malign influence campaign or attempted to influence US elections in coordination with Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB). Russia has repeatedly denied claims that it interfered in the 2016 US voting process.
The US Treasury Department also announced sanctions against Ionov last year, blocking any assets he may have in the US and prohibiting US citizens and companies from doing business with him. Ionov said the financial sanctions effectively barred him from hiring a lawyer in the US.
"I can't pay a lawyer for his services because I'm also under sanctions. So if a lawyer takes money from me, he will be put in jail or whatever. They are trying to deprive me of any means to defend myself," he told Sputnik.
Ionov described the DOJ charges and the smear campaign against him in the US as a nightmare.
“I have never been to the US, and the information that American media and officials have been publishing on their official platforms looks like a nightmare to me,” he confessed.
Ionov accused the DOJ of not being transparent in its accusations against him. The DOJ has not published any documents in the conspiracy case and is actively trying to politicize it without providing any evidence of wrongdoing, he said.
“They called me a national security threat back in October. I still don’t know what threat I posed to them because the documents remain sealed — they have not been made public,” he said, adding that the DOJ based the charges on intelligence reports.
"They are actively politicizing my case. They have not been able to find any evidence to substantiate my case other than the biased and unproven [allegations] they made in the indictment," he said.
These unsubstantiated claims stand in stark contrast to the US’s efforts to portray itself as a beacon of democracy and transparency, the Russian activist argued. He said the Justice Department was offering a bounty for any information about his alleged malicious campaign in an attempt to address this glaring gap in the case it was building against "the evil Russian who recruited Americans everywhere to undermine democracy," as he described himself.
The indictment alleges that from at least December 2014 through March 2022, Ionov recruited and funded political groups in the US to publish "pro-Russian propaganda." The DOJ says he supported political campaigns in Florida, promoted California's secession from the US, and funded a protest tour in support of a petition criticizing the "genocide" of African people in the US.
Sharing Experience
Ionov also noted that American rights advocacy groups had engaged Russian counterparts to gain experience that they successfully applied at home.
"There are many such [useful] laws in Russia, for example, the law on social control, which Americans in the state of Illinois, for example, learned about and actively promoted. Last year, they successfully passed a watered-down Russian version of the law, which established social control over the police. Now civil society activists can come to a police station and assess detention conditions," he said.
The number of engagements between Russian and American human rights defenders declined after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but was back on the rise in the 2010s. Russians and Americans have met in the Middle East to discuss US rights abuses in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, Ionov, who heads the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR), said.
"After the so-called Arab Spring began in the Middle East, many rights defenders and activists in the West spoke out against interference in other countries’ home affairs. They came together to form solidarity groups around the world,” he said.
The activist also stressed that many US human rights groups had not stopped cooperating with his Moscow-based organization after the Department of Justice charged him with election meddling.
Musk Protecting Free Speech
During the interview, Ionov praised Elon Musk for daring to speak his mind, but argued that the billionaire entrepreneur was still constrained by the White House in what he could say.
“Musk is the world’s richest man. What he says makes sense. But I think he is still limited in what he can do by the White House and security agencies. No one is safe. Society there [in the US] has to live by the rules of the White House. Dissenting voices are censored and people who speak out are punished," Ionov said.
Musk, the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” has ruffled feathers in Washington by challenging the US narrative on Ukraine. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO controversially compared US military involvement in Ukraine to that in Afghanistan and published a map of Ukraine’s 2012 voting preferences that showed the country clearly split along West-Russia lines.