“Free Karelia” is a regionalist movement, which is happy to welcome all the citizens of Karelia regardless of their nationality.

A citizen of Karelia for us is any person, who lives in Karelia and considers it as his/her motherland, who is interested in a steady and independent development of Karelia.

Modern regionalism promotes the idea of creating various forms of civil self-government within the confines of a region and preserving the cultural identity of every region.

The concept of modern regionalism is very often confused with separatism. However, regarding European Union as an example, we can see that different movements within it can’t but deepen the European integration process by establishing and developing ties between each other. Karelian regionalists are also interested in establishing relations based on mutual interest with other regions of Russia and Europe and other regionalist movements all over the world.

The “Free Karelia” movement pursues a social policy which is highly peaceful and contains no violations of the law which is provided by the constitution of Karelia, the constitution of Russian Federation and international law.

Nevertheless, we strongly believe that the centralized Russian system of managing regions in Russia runs around obsolete and inhibits the full development of Karelia. The system according to which all the resources of Karelia are accumulated by Moscow and federal bodies of Russian government, while the government of Karelia is appointed and not elected, can not be considered as a fair system by us. This kind of system presents the resurrection of Soviet totalitarian system. However, we should remind those who promote this system that it has already once collapsed…

We believe that the Republic of Karelia should remain a part of Russian Federation only if some truly federalist and democratic principles provided by international law are applied here. In case Russian government continues to conduct the policy of turning the regions of Russian Federation into colonies without any rights, the “Free Karelia” movement considers itself legitimate enough to initiate a referendum in Karelia to make our republic a truly sovereign and independent state.