New trial for Alexei Navalny, who faces 10 years in prison


Alexeï Navalny, tried again, faces a ten-year prison sentence.

A year after his arrest, Alexeï Navalny tried again. A Russian court started on Tuesday the trial of the Russian opponent, accused of having embezzled more than 356 million rubles (nearly 4.2 million euros) in donations paid to the Anti-Corruption Fund (FBK) , his organization since classified as a “terrorist and extremist”. Already imprisoned for violating the conditions of a reprieve by being rushed for treatment in Germany after being the victim of an attempted poisoning, he faces a ten-year prison sentence if convicted of these new charges.

Alexeï Navalny appears from the penal colony of Pokrov, in prisoner’s uniform, a decision which he strongly criticized: “I am not yet found guilty, but I am presented in prisoner’s uniform”, he launched, still thin after last spring’s hunger strike. “It’s so that the grandmother who watches TV thinks that [je] I’m already in jail anyway,” he added. For his chief of staff Leonid Volkov, the absence of a glass box in which the defendant is placed is “symbolic”: “There is no traditional “cage” for the prisoner in court. Because the whole court is a cage. The judge is in a cage. The prosecutor is in a cage. And only Alexei Navalny is a free man,” he wrote, adding a photo showing the opponent arm in the air, behind his wife Yulia.

To read :Alexei Navalny, Putin’s prisoner

“I’m not afraid”, assures Navalny

“You will increase my sentence indefinitely”, launched Alexeï Navalny, who also faces six months in prison for contempt during a previous court appearance, to the judges. “But what can we do about it? What people do is more important than one person’s fate. I’m not afraid,” continued the man who joked, assuring his supporters that he would be “free no later than the spring of 2051”.

Last month, to mark the anniversary of his arrest at Moscow airport on returning from his convalescence in Germany, Alexei Navalny said he “did not regret a second” to have returned to Russia. “After a year in prison, I tell you what I shouted in court: do not be afraid,” he wrote in the text sent from Vladimir prison, where he is imprisoned. “I recently read that Home Office workers are being fired for liking one of my posts. So in Russia in 2022, even a like can be a show of courage.” “There was no discussion about whether or not to return to Russia. We knew he would be imprisoned, but not necessarily from the airport. It was the most shocking moment, so shameful that they decide to arrest him at the airport, not let him go home, talk to his parents, to our family,” his daughter Daria confirmed in December. Navalnaya, who came to Strasbourg to receive on her behalf the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, awarded by the European Parliament.

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