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Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is seen on a television screen as he appears in a video link provided by the Russian Federal Prison Service during a hearing at the penal colony in Melekhovo, northeast of Moscow, on Friday.
Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
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Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is seen on a television screen as he appears in a video link provided by the Russian Federal Prison Service during a hearing at the penal colony in Melekhovo, northeast of Moscow, on Friday.
Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
MOSCOW – A Russian court has convicted and sentenced opposition leader Alexey Navalny to an additional 19 years in prison on extremism-related charges – the latest in a string of harsh prison sentences handed out to political opponents of the Kremlin amid the war in Ukraine.
The trial of Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest domestic critic, took place behind closed doors and in highly unusual circumstances. Judges moved the courtroom from Moscow to a maximum security prison in Melekhovo – about 150 miles east of the capital – where Navalny is already serving a 9-year sentence for fraud and embezzlement.
In Friday’s ruling, the court found that Navalny had retroactively financed and encouraged “extremist activities” through his now-defunct Anti-Corruption Foundation. Judges also found the opposition leader guilty of “rehabilitating Nazi ideology.”
Navalny, 47, has denied the charges and dismissed the prison trial – which resulted in his fifth criminal conviction in recent years – as the latest round of political retaliation by a Kremlin intent on silencing him long-term.
A war critic behind bars
Even from prison, Navalny has remained an influential voice in Russian politics.
Navalny’s access to lawyers – and through them a team of associates in exile – has allowed the opposition figure to maintain an active presence on social media.
He routinely posts on Twitter and other social media channels about his prison conditions and weighs in on political issues. He has also openly criticized war in Ukraine as immoral.
Last month, Navalny’s associates revealed a online political campaign to try to turn the public against Putin and the war.
Recent court cases have also given him a stage to argue that the Kremlin’s invasion led to Russia’s ruin.
“It is now wallowing in a pool of mud and blood, with broken bones and an impoverished, looted population; and with tens of thousands of people dead in the most stupid and senseless war of the 21st century,” Navalny said in a closing statement to the court last month that was later shared by supporters online.
But with the sentence also come harsher prison conditions that will likely reduce Navalny’s access to the outside world.
Soviet-style sentencing
Prior to the decision, Navalny said he had no illusions of Russian justice or the long sentence that awaited him.
The decision, Navalny promised in a statement, would be “Stalinist” – a reference to the grim Soviet prison camps overseen by dictator Joseph Stalin in the 1930s.
It was also, Navalny argued, a flawed modern Kremlin strategy to instill despair.
“Those in power cannot keep it without arresting innocent people. They imprison hundreds to instill fear in millions,” Navalny wrote.
Navalny called on Russians to make small but daily contributions to resist a government that, he claimed, had taken the country hostage.
“There is no shame in choosing the safest way to resist. The shame lies in doing nothing, in allowing yourself to be intimidated,” Navalny wrote in his statement.
It was a tacit acknowledgment that perhaps few were prepared for Navalny’s own level of risk and sacrifice.
In 2020, he narrowly survived poisoning by a nerve agent, which he blamed on the Kremlin. After he eventually recovered in Germany, he returned to Russia – and was promptly imprisoned.
Still, Navalny has maintained optimism that a younger generation of Russians would eventually reclaim what he often calls “the beautiful Russia of the future” from the country’s current crisis.
“Of course, sooner or later (Russia) will rise again,” Navalny said in his closing comments to the court last month.
“And what that future is built on depends on us.”
