The more years Alexei Navalny has been in prison, the more years of his sentence lie ahead of him. The Russian opposition politician, imprisoned since 2021, today Friday added an additional 19 years to his sentence for a criminal case that he, his supporters and prominent NGOs consider fabricated.
The charges are tied to his role in his now canceled political movement in Russia. According to the authorities, Navalny had been trying to foment a revolution seeking to destabilize the sociopolitical situation. State prosecutors had asked the court to sentence him to another 20 years.
The European Union criticized the ruling of the Russian court. “The verdict of this new mock trial against Alexei Navalny is unacceptable. This arbitrary sentence is the answer to his courage to criticize the Kremlin regime,” said the President of the European Council, Charles Michel.
Navalny, considered the harshest critic of President Vladimir Putin in Russia, had already predicted his guilty verdict, which he says is intended to scare Russians into more jail time. The opposition leader is already serving sentences totaling 11 1/2 years for fraud and other charges.
At first the Putin regime said that the trial against him had no political implications, that it was only for corruption. But soon after his political movement was outlawed and declared “extremist.” He also banned all his collaborators in all the elections.
Their first entry into prison was for violating the open regime while they were in a coma in Germany after being the victim of a poisoning in 2020 for which both their environment and foreign security services blame Russia. Adding sentences, Navalny is exposed to spending about 30 years in prison.
Since then Russian justice, which rarely contradicts the government, has been merciless with him. On this occasion, he was accused not only of creating an extremist organization, but also of rehabilitating Nazism and calling for extremism. They also point to him for raising funds to “finance extremism” and creating a non-governmental organization (the Navalny Anti-Corruption Fund) whose activities according to the Russian regime incite crime. Also for involving a minor in the commission of illegal acts. For this position, the Russian authorities have relied on the attendance of minors under 18 years of age at their rallies.
Navalny says that all the charges now and before are politically motivated and false, that the regime simply wants him behind bars and out of politics for longer, but he has called on the Russians to think about how best to resist what which he calls the “villains and thieves in the Kremlin”.
The court of the IK-6 penal colony in Melejovo, some 235 kilometers east of Moscow, where he is serving his sentence, has been the one that has judged the case, which surely will not be the last against this activist, who rose to fame with the first demonstrations in 2011 after announcing that Putin was preparing to return to the presidency.
In a message posted on social media Thursday, Navalny, 47, said the verdict actually mattered because he was also threatened with extra terrorism charges, which could mean another extra decade behind bars.
It’s unclear what that terrorism case could be linked to, but Russia’s Federal Security Service has said that Ukraine and several Russian opposition figures (including Navalny’s supporters) were involved in the killing of a prominent Russian war propagandist. , Vladlen Tatarsky. Terrorism carries a sentence in Russia of up to 35 years.
Dressed in his dark convict uniform and flanked by his lawyers, Navalny smiled from time to time as he listened to the judge before the verdict was handed down. As reported by Reuters, the audio transmission from the court was so bad that it was virtually impossible to understand what the judge was saying.
The Kremlin denies persecuting Navalny, whom Russian authorities have portrayed sometimes as a radical Russian nationalist, other times as a political disruptor backed by Western liberals and Jews. After years assuring that Navalny has no support within Russia, in 2021 the regime began to point out his dangerousness, but always excusing himself that his case is purely a legal matter for the courts, not a political one.
“We are not following this trial,” Putin’s spokesman Dimitri Peskov told reporters in June. Russian President Vladimir Putin always avoids saying Navalny’s name in public. But his imprisonment has popularized his figure, and so has his investigation into scandalous corruption in Russia’s elite. Now all critical media is banned, and dissidents are in jail or in exile.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
