[ad_1]
A Moscow court sentenced Alexei Navalny to two years and eight months in a prison colony in a landmark decision over Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on the country’s leading opposition figure.
Navalny, who has accused the Russian president and his allies of stealing billions, was jailed for violating the probation of a 2014 sentence for embezzlement in a case he said was politically motivated.
After the verdict, several hundred Navalny supporters marched in central Moscow. Videos from local media or shared on social media showed police in bulletproof vests hitting protesters with batons. More than 1,000 people were arrested across Russia over the course of the day, according to the independent monitoring group OVD-info.
The court’s decision makes Navalny Russia’s most prominent political prisoner and may be the most important verdict against an enemy of Putin since the 2005 imprisonment of oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Before the verdict, Navalny looked across the courtroom at his wife Yulia and traced a heart on the glass around the pier.
After a judge read the verdict, subtracting the 10 months she had spent under house arrest from her original sentence of three and a half years, Yulia removed her mask, smiled, waved, and then shrugged.
“Do not be sad! Everything will be fine! Navalny yelled at him. He declined to comment as he walked out of the courtroom, staring straight ahead.
Outside the courthouse, he was with Navalny’s two lawyers, Olga Mikhailova and Vladimir Kobzev. They said they planned to appeal to the European court for human rights. “You saw what happened there,” Mikhailova said. “It was a horror, as always.”
The Kremlin’s decision to send Navalny to prison came despite the threat of more street protests and international condemnation from the US government and other foreign leaders. The court was attended by diplomats from more than half a dozen Western countries.
In an energetic speech from a Moscow city court decorated with portraits of Cicero and Montesquieu before the sentencing, Navalny had accused Putin of ordering his murder with the novichok poison and said that the Russian leader’s “only method is to kill people. “.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said Washington was “deeply concerned” and reiterated calls for Navalny’s immediate and unconditional release, saying he would coordinate with allies to hold Russia accountable.
Boris Johnson described the ruling as “sheer cowardice”, which failed to meet “the most basic standards of fairness.”
“Alexey Navalny must be released immediately,” he wrote.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas described it as a “bitter blow” to the rule of law in Russia.
The sentence has shown the exhaustion of Russian leaders with Navalny, who even from prison published a detailed investigation into a billion-pound palace on the Black Sea supposedly built for Putin’s use.
He was arrested upon returning to Russia last month after surviving an alleged FSB assassination attempt in August 2020 with a novichok poison similar to that used in Salisbury in 2018.
Russian prison officials had said while Navalny was recovering in Germany that they would seek to imprison him for violating probation in the 2014 case in an apparent attempt to keep the Kremlin critic in exile, but he returned anyway.
Profile
Who is Alexei Navalny?
Alexei Navalny, born in 1976 outside Moscow, is a lawyer-turned-activist whose Anti-Corruption Foundation investigates the wealth of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
He started out as a Russian nationalist, but emerged as the main leader of the Russian democratic opposition during the wave of protests that led to the 2012 presidential elections, and has since been a thorn in the side of the Kremlin.
Navalny is banned from appearing on state television, but has used social media to his advantage. A 2017 documentary accusing Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of corruption received more than 30 million views on YouTube in two months.
He has been repeatedly arrested and jailed. The European court of human rights ruled that Russia violated Navalny’s rights by keeping him under house arrest in 2014. Election officials barred him from running for president in 2018 due to a conviction for embezzlement that he claimed was politically motivated. Navalny told the commission that his decision would be a vote ‘not against me, but against the 16,000 people who have nominated me; against 200,000 volunteers who have been requesting me. ‘
There has also been a physical price to pay. In April 2017, he was attacked with a green tint that nearly blinded him in one eye, and in July 2019 he was taken from jail to hospital with symptoms that one of his doctors said could indicate poisoning. In 2020, he was hospitalized again after suspected poisoning and taken to Germany for treatment. The German government later said that toxicology results showed Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent.
“Someone did not want me to take a single step in the territory of my country as a free man. And we know who and we know why: the hatred and fear of a man, who lives in a bunker, whom I offended by surviving when he tried to kill me, ”he said about Putin.
Their only method is to kill people. As much as he pretends to be a great geopolitician, he will go down in history as a poisoner. “
“We all remember Alexander the Liberator and Yaroslav the Wise. Now we have Vladimir the underpants poisoner. “
“This is not a political rally,” the judge interrupted him at one point. “Let’s not do politics here.”
The 16-minute speech may be one of the opposition leader’s last public prayers for years to come. Investigators are preparing to press new charges against Navalny for fraud and other charges that could carry a sentence of another decade in a penal colony if brought to trial.
In his comments, Navalny asked his followers not to fear the government, saying: “You cannot jail the whole country.” More than 5,000 people were detained in nationwide protests this weekend and Navalny’s high-ranking aides were caught in government raids.
“Locking me up is not difficult,” Navalny told the court. “This is happening to intimidate a large number of people. They are incarcerating one person to scare millions. “
He called the court case a “performance.” “This is what happens when anarchy and tyranny become the essence of a political system, and it is horrible,” he said.
For years, the government had hounded Navalny, keeping him under house arrest, incarcerating his aides and incarcerating his brother for three and a half years in 2014. But as of Tuesday, it had failed to give him a long prison sentence. apparently out of fear of a backlash.
In 2013, a judge abruptly released Navalny on probation one day after thousands of people protested his five-year prison sentence on the streets outside the Kremlin. The sudden change confirmed what many in the opposition believed: that important judicial decisions are made in the Kremlin.
The state of mind of the government it apparently changed after the failed assassination attempt and a deeply shameful investigation by Bellingcat, which exposed the attack as the work of an FSB assault squad that had followed Navalny around Russia for years. With a flourish, Navalny managed to extract a confession from a member of the FSB, the Russian intelligence service formerly led by Putin.
Diplomats present at the hearing were chased by state television journalists and peppered with questions about whether they were providing political support to Navalny. Navalny’s allies have also called for new sanctions against some of Putin’s closest allies and officials involved in his case.
Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, called the presence of Western diplomats “meddlesome”.
“It exposes the petty and illegal role of the collective West in attempts to restrain Russia,” he said. “Or is it an attempt to psychologically pressure the judge?”
