Russia puts critic Navalny on trial
MOSCOW, April 15, (AFP): Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny goes on trial Wednesday on embezzlement charges carrying a maximum 10-year jail term but which he argues were ordered by President Vladimir Putin to eliminate a dangerous foe from politics.
The hearings in the provincial city of Kirov will be the latest trial in Russia slammed by Putin’s opponents as a Soviet-style political setup after the jailing of anti-Kremlin tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and radical rock group Pussy Riot.
Navalny, a 36-year-old lawyer with piercing blue eyes and the confident ability to rally crowds, has rattled the Kremlin with his rapid emergence as tireless anti-corruption campaigner and a new kind of political leader.
He is charged with organising the misappropriation through a timber deal of more than 16 million rubles ($509,000) from the Kirov regional government that he advised in 2009.
An earlier probe into the same deal was closed last year. Navalny is to stand trial with his alleged accomplice, timber company owner, Pyotr Ofitserov.
Navalny, a Yale University world fellow in 2010, declared his ambition to stand for president in an interview this month with opposition TV Dozhd channel, saying he wanted to “change life in the country”.
Analysts described Navalny’s announcement as a clear bid to cast himself as a political prisoner should he be jailed.
Navalny insists the charge against him was fabricated on Putin’s order. He told opposition New Times week- ly that he believed Putin was “personally giving directions” in the case.
“Looking back, Navalny’s trial will be seen by many as Putin’s reprisal against his only real competitor,” Alexei Zakharov of the Higher School of Economics wrote in an editorial in Vedomosti business daily.
The spokesman of the powerful Investigative Committee, Vladimir Markin, bluntly acknowledged last week that Navalny was specially targeted for investigation because of his repeated “teasing” of the Kremlin.
“If the suspect is going out of his way to attract attention, even teases the authorities... then the interest toward his past grows and the process of bringing it out to the open hastens,” Markin told the proKremlin Izvestia daily.