Russia: 13 years in prison required against Alexei Navalny


Thirteen years in prison were required on Tuesday against Russian opponent Alexei Navalny, tried for fraud and insulting a magistrate.

At the start of his trial last month, Alexeï Navalny was ironic, assuring his supporters that he would be “free no later than the spring of 2051”. This Tuesday, the Russian prosecution requested 13 years in prison against him, following his trial for fraud and insulting a magistrate. To these 13 years are added “two additional years of limitation of freedom” and a fine of 1.2 million rubles (about 9500 euros at present).

Alexei Navalny is accused of having embezzled more than 356 million rubles (nearly 4.2 million euros, at the time of the opening of the trial) of donations paid to the Anti-Corruption Fund (FBK), his organization since classified as a “terrorist and extremist”. “Alexeï Navalny’s sentence is well known: life imprisonment. Until the life of one of these people ends: Navalny or Vladimir Putin. If Putin thinks he will still be there for 13 years, he is overestimating his own abilities, ”wrote Leonid Volkov, chief of staff of the Russian opponent, who himself lives in exile, on Twitter.

Shortly before the requisitions, relatives of Alexeï Navalny had published the telephone bills showing that the head of public relations of the Kremlin had contacted Judge Margarita Kotova several times during the trial, specifies the “Moscow Times”. Proving, according to them, that this trial was guided by the Kremlin to silence one of the main opponents of Vladimir Putin while hundreds of people have been arrested in recent weeks for protesting against the war in Ukraine.

“I am not afraid”

The trial took place in an improvised court in the penal colony of Pokrov, where Alexei Navalny is already serving a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence, the reprieve to which he had been sentenced in 2014 and which the Russian justice considered violated when he was transported, urgently and unconscious, to Germany for treatment after the poisoning of which he was the victim in the summer of 2020. “You will increase my sentence indefinitely”, had launched Alexeï Navalny at the opening of his trial . “But what can we do about it? What people do is more important than one person’s fate. I’m not afraid,” he continued.

Last January, 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 a text sent from prison. “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.”

At a recent hearing, he spoke out against the war in Ukraine: “I think this war is designed to distract from Russia’s problems, and that will only lead to further impoverishment. I consider those who started this war bandits and thieves. I got involved in politics to fight this criminal regime of thieves,” he said. “This war will cause a large number of victims, waste lives and continue the policy of impoverishment of Russian citizens”.

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