Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, jailed since early 2021, has been sentenced to another 19 years in prison after being found guilty of extremism charges in a new case, Russian media reported on Friday.
That is a fresh blow for a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, coming amid an intensifying crackdown on dissent in the country.
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Navalny was accused of creating an extremist community, financing extremist activities and various other crimes. He was found guilty this Friday at the high-security prison where he is being held.
Putin’s opponent is already serving sentences totaling 11 and a half years in a maximum security prison on fraud and other charges he says are trumped up.
He and his supporters claim his arrest and imprisonment were politically motivated, intended to silence his criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The trial ended in June and took place behind closed doors at the IK-6 penal colony where Navalny is being held in the town of Melekhovo, east of Moscow.
Friday’s conviction extends Navalny’s jail term and raises further concerns about the brutal crackdown on Putin’s opponents that has been ramped up since the start of the war in Ukraine.
Navalny has been jailed since returning to Russia in January 2021 on charges of violating terms of his probation in a case involving fraud charges, which he dismisses as politically motivated.
Since then, there have been concerns about his well-being. Navalny has lost weight and has been suffering from stomach pains since the beginning of this year, leading his lawyers to fear he has been poisoned again.
In August 2020, he was flown to Germany from Russia after he was poisoned with the Soviet-era chemical compound Novichok. Navalny was in a coma in a Berlin hospital after being transferred on an emergency medical flight from the Siberian city of Omsk.
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A joint investigation by the CNN and the Bellingcat group pointed to the responsibility of the Federal Security Service (FSB) in Navalny’s poisoning, going back to how an elite unit of the Russian agency accompanied Navalny’s team during a trip to Siberia, when he fell ill.
The investigation also found that this unit, which included chemical weapons experts, had followed Navalny on more than 30 trips to and from Moscow since 2017.
Russia denies involvement in the Navalny poisoning. Putin himself said in December 2020 that if the Russian security services had wanted to kill Navalny, they “would have finished” the job.
While the Russian authorities’ focus on Navalny predates Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the country has even more dramatically cracked down on domestic opposition and free speech since the start of the war.
An expanded and intentionally vague “foreign agents” law came into effect late last year, requiring organizations and individuals involved in political activities and receiving funding from abroad to follow draconian rules and restrictions.
Russia has also restricted access to Facebook, many Western news sites and independent media in the country. Peaceful protests were quickly ended and thousands arrested after the outbreak of war.
And the government adopted a law criminalizing the dissemination of what it called “deliberately false” information about the Russian military, with a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.
Navalny, however, has been a scathing critic of the conflict. On the anniversary of the war in February this year, he called it “an unjust war of aggression against Ukraine under ridiculous pretexts”.
Source: CNN Brasil
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