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- Just days after being sentenced to several years in a prison camp, Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny is on trial again.
- The indictment: Navalny is said to have insulted a World War II veteran. You face a fine or forced labor.
- Meanwhile, Nawalny supporters want to temporarily suspend their mass protests and not continue until spring.
Navalny had criticized a video broadcast in state media last summer in which several citizens spoke out in favor of a constitutional amendment.
“Look at them: they are the shame of the country,” Navalny wrote on Twitter in early June of the people in the clip, calling them “traitors.” As one of them fought in World War II, Navalny must now answer for defamation of veterans. Critics see the constitutional reform as an instrument to ensure the power of the head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin.
In another trial, Navalny was sentenced to several years in a prison camp on Tuesday. It is said that he violated probation requirements while in Germany after a poison attack. The sentence has been criticized internationally for political reasons.
Protests only again in spring
Meanwhile, Nawalny supporters have announced that they will temporarily halt the mass protests and will not continue until spring. If you now call for demonstrations every week, the number of participants would gradually decrease and that would demotivate people, Nawalny employee Leonid Volkov said Thursday night in a live broadcast on YouTube.
“That does not mean that we completely renounce the protests,” added the government critic, who lives abroad. It will do “something big” in spring and summer. Navalny’s team will focus primarily on the Russian parliamentary elections in September. In recent weeks, tens of thousands took to the streets for the liberation of Navalny and against the head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin. There was massive police violence and thousands of arrests. Volkov spoke of a “terribly high price.” “But it had a purpose.”
