Ally says 20-year term sought for Navalny
TALLINN, Estonia — Russian prosecutors have asked a court to sentence imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny to 20 years in prison on extremism charges, his ally Ivan Zhdanov said Thursday.
According to Zhdanov, the trial against Navalny, which has been held in private in the prison where the politician is serving another lengthy sentence, is scheduled to conclude with a verdict on Aug. 4. If the court finds Navalny guilty, it will be his fifth criminal conviction, all of which have been widely seen as a deliberate strategy by the Kremlin to silence its ardent opponent.
In his closing statement released Thursday by his team, Navalny bashed Russian authorities as being governed by “bargaining, power, bribery, deception, treachery … and not law.” Navalny said:
“Anyone in Russia knows that a person who seeks justice in a court of law is completely vulnerable. The case of that person is hopeless.”
Navalny, 47, is President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe who exposed official corruption and organized major anti-Kremlin protests. He was arrested in January 2021 upon returning to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin.
The authorities sentenced him to 2½ years in prison for parole violations and then to another nine years on charges of fraud and contempt of court.
The politician is currently serving his sentence in a maximum-security prison east of Moscow. He has spent months in a tiny one-person cell, also called a “punishment cell,” for purported disciplinary violations such as an alleged failure to properly button his prison clothes, properly introduce himself to a guard or to wash his face at a specified time.
Navalny’s allies have accused prison authorities of failing to provide him with proper medical assistance and voiced concern about his health.
The new charges relate to the activities of Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation and statements by his top associates. His allies said the charges retroactively criminalize all the foundation’s activities since its creation in 2011.
Navalny has rejected all the charges against him as politically motivated and has accused the Kremlin of seeking to keep him behind bars for life.
One of his associates — Daniel Kholodny — was relocated from a different prison to face trial alongside him. The prosecution has asked to sentence Kholodny to 10 years in prison.
The trial against the two began a month ago and went along swiftly by Russian standards, where people often spend months, if not years, awaiting for their verdict. It was unusually shielded from public attention and Navalny’s lawyers haven’t offered any comments on the proceedings.
Navalny, in his sardonic social media posts, occasionally offered a glimpse of what was going on with his case. In one such post, the politician revealed that a song by a popular Russian rapper praising him was listed as evidence in the case files, and claimed that he made the judge and bailiffs laugh out loud as the song was read out during a court hearing. In another, he said that the case files linked him to U.S. mogul Warren Buffet.