Russian opponent Alexei Navalny, 45, sentenced to two years and eight months in prison, could spend up to 10 and a half more years in jail for a new accusation of fraud. “I will continue to fight against the power. I fear neither the FSB, nor chemical weapons, nor Putin. I am not afraid ”, he exclaimed before the court that tried him in a high security prison a hundred kilometers from Moscow. “Never in the history of all courts in the Russian Federation, and I think even in the entire history of trials in the Soviet Union, has the court met in another territory, let alone in a prison,” the activist said. , whose situation has once again made the news in Russia after having been relegated to a discreet background in recent months due to the military escalation on the border with Ukraine and the dizzying rise in prices of basic goods.
With visible physical deterioration, but energetic in attacking his accusers, the opponent was able to hug his wife, Yulia Naválnaya, who accompanied him throughout the session, for the first time in a long time.
The opponent, his former campaign manager, Leonid Volkov, and the former director of the Platform Against Corruption, Román Rubánov, were accused by the Russian Investigative Committee of having diverted 356 million rubles (4.14 million euros) “for purposes personal” from the money raised for the 2018 election campaign and other initiatives. However, in this trial the demand was limited to just 2.7 million rubles delivered by four of its more than 300,000 donors, who have caused enormous suspicion in the defense: according to the prosecution report, three of them transferred between 665,583 and 1.2 million rubles each, very high figures considering that according to Navalni’s team one of them was a mechanic and two other businessmen who had criminal proceedings pending.
“We do not receive public money and I am very proud of it. We exist because we have support,” Navalni said at another point in his speech, which has been posted on social media. “We have seen how all the expenses of a politician for five years have been disclosed for the first time. In total I spent eight million, which is an average of 130,000 rubles per month (just over 1,500 euros), less than my official income, “explained Navalni.
In addition to the two charges for the alleged fraud, the activist is charged with two other accusations for offending a judge, a prosecutor and a witness during one of his 2021 court hearings.
One day before the trial, Yulia Naválnaya wrote a post on Instagram in honor of her husband. “The people of the Kremlin fear him so much that he is the first person in Russia to be tried directly from prison,” she said in a text accompanied by the photo of their last meeting together in prison. Naválnaya lamented that they had set the session just one day before one of the four days a year to which inmates are entitled to have long meetings with family members, “the most important day of the year for the incarcerated person,” as he stressed in his message. “They want to keep him away from all the people, from the assistants, from the journalists,” his wife denounced on the social network, where she stated that this process “is so terrible that the court does not have the courage to do it in Moscow” because “Alexei is he will stand proud before the accusation and will laugh at everything.”
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Navalni’s lawyer Olga Mijaílova denounced through a statement that her client is the victim “of arbitrary, unreasonable and illegal criminal persecution” aimed “at his discredit and his removal from political activity”, which violates the European Convention for the protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
Navalni has been in prison for more than a year. The activist was arrested on January 17, 2021 as soon as he landed in Moscow for failing to appear for judicial reviews of his parole, imposed in 2014 by the Yves Rocher case, whose sentence was declared “unfair and arbitrary” by the European Court of Human Rights in 2017, considering that neither he nor his brother received a fair trial. However, instead of accepting this decision, the Russian justice system decided to replace the sentence with probation.
The opponent was arrested when he returned from his convalescence in a Berlin hospital after being poisoned with Novichok, as confirmed by the investigation of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. A research of the investigative journalism project bellingcat and various digital media such as The Insider revealed before his return that the opponent had been followed by a group from the Federal Security Service (FSB) until the day he fell into a coma, something that Russian President Vladimir Putin himself acknowledged on December 17, 2020.
Since he was sentenced to prison in February 2021, all of Navalni’s organizations have been liquidated one after another under the label of “extremist organizations”, and many of his allies have been forced to leave the country for fear of joining the jail.
One of them, Leonid Volkov, wanted to highlight on Twitter the “symbolic” side of this process. “In the court there is not the usual ‘cage’ for prisoners because the whole court is a cage. The judge is in a cage. The prosecutor is in a cage. Only Alexei Navalny is a free man.”
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