Verdict against Navalny: “We are concerned about our country”

The verdict is not surprising: Russian opposition politician Navalny has to go to prison for years. More than 1,000 people are arrested during protests by his supporters.

Hundreds of special policemen stand in front of the Moscow City Court, all the streets are cordoned off. If you are unlucky enough to live too close to the courthouse, you must show your ID and registration address so that OMON police officers dressed in black and in their bulletproof vests will let you through the barriers. People call OMON men “cosmonauts” because of the round helmets and protective shields made of hard plastic on the arms and legs.

Access to the hearing, in which the sentence of Alexei Navalny is decided, is guaranteed as a state border. An old woman at the bus stop is very upset about the closures: she says, “the criminal should finally be taken away, ideally for 20 years.” She doesn’t want to say more about that.

Navalny is aggressive

The hearing in the Navalny case begins in the morning: the criminal authorities had requested that an expired suspended sentence be converted retrospectively to prison. Navalny violated the conditions of probation several times and over and over again. Even during the time he was in Germany.

For a long time, says the agency representative, no one knew where Navalny was staying. This is a great idea for him: Don’t you respect your own president? According to Navalny, he himself said at his big annual press conference that Navalny was in Berlin at the Charite.

Kremlin critic Navalny sentenced to three and a half years in prison

Ina Ruck, ARD Moscow, daily news 8:00 pm, 2.2.2021

He’s aggressive as always, but you can see the nervous tension in his voice. He has prepared for this hearing and at the end he gives a direct speech with sharp and insulting attacks, a broadside against President Putin. Navalny calls him a “murderer”, a “little man in the bunker”, and predicts that he will not go down in history as a great geostrategy or politician of global importance, but simply as an “underwear poisoner”.

He refers to his own research after the Novichok neurotoxin apparently attached itself to his underpants. Briefs have long become a symbol of protest. During the demonstrations, people let blue underwear fly out the open windows of their cars.

Protests in front of the court

While a visibly overwhelmed judge in court reads the files in a monotonous tone (the trial’s head judge had only kicked him out a few days earlier), Nawalny’s supporters gather outside. Not as many as last Sunday’s protest: on a working day, hardly anyone has time to spend hours in front of a court.

Vladimir, 59, arrived immediately after the night shift. He is a worker, “people like me always supported Putin.” He felt almost compelled to stay there despite the exhaustion. “All my colleagues at the plant saw the latest Navalny investigation, the movie about the palace. It impressed all of us. For us, Navalny is a hero. He escaped death and is back in battle.”

“We are concerned about our country”

There are also young people – Mila and Katja, for example, two young people who, as they say, “want to have children in this country” and do not emigrate, like so many, so that their children can grow up in freedom. society. “I think there will be more and more people who think like this,” says Mila. We do not come here to have fun, we are concerned about our country. And if even young people say something like that, it means something. ”

In reality, he is not a fan of Navalny, says another man, Yevgeny: “But because he tells the truth that everyone else hides from us, which is never told on television. Because he dares to do it, although it is like in our country a crime he’s tried to tell the truth, I respect him for that. ”

While saying this, the police took several Navalny supporters and put them in the “Avtozak”, a prison van with bars. Even before the trial in the court next door is over, 300 are temporarily arrested in the surrounding streets; According to activists, there are around 1,100 at night.

The trial did not surprise anyone

When the judge later reads the verdict in the courtroom, no one is surprised: Navalny is arrested. And yet you can see that it hits him. Although his imprisonment is shorter than feared, a year that he has already been under house arrest will be taken into account. So it should be in the field not three and a half years, but probably two years and eight months. With his finger he draws a heart on the armored glass of the glass cage in which he participates in the negotiation: his wife Julia is sitting in the audience and watches it.

The lawyers now have ten days to appeal, they have already announced it. And then there is still the threat of the next trial: Navalny is accused of embezzlement of donations; it could receive up to ten years. It is quite possible that he will disappear from the scene for many years. It could be forgotten, or it could become a symbol of resistance. Because the problem that the Kremlin has now is not simply being locked up: the malaise and discontent that has given Navalny a voice will remain.