MOSCOW (AP) – A Russian court on Tuesday sentenced leading opposition leader Alexei Navalny to nine more years in prison for fraud and contempt of court, in what was seen as an attempt to keep President Vladimir Putin’s biggest enemy behind bars for as long as possible .
The new verdict follows a year-long crackdown by Putin on Navalny’s supporters, other opposition activists and independent journalists, during which the authorities appear intent on quashing any dissent.
Navalny’s close associates were prosecuted and fled the country, and his group’s political infrastructure — an anti-corruption foundation and a nationwide network of regional offices — was destroyed after it was labeled an extremist organization.
Navalny, 45, who survived a nerve agent poisoning in 2020 that he attributes to the Kremlin, has been in a penal colony east of Moscow for two and a half years for violating probation. The new trial took place in a makeshift courtroom at the facility.
In a Facebook post by his team shortly after the sentence, the otherwise smug Navalny said: “My space flight is taking a little longer than expected.”
He added that neither he nor his comrades “will just wait” and announced that his anti-corruption foundation would become an international organization that “fight (Putin) until we win”.
“We will find all their mansions in Monaco, their mansions in Miami, their riches everywhere – and when we do that, we will take everything from the Russian criminal elite,” the foundation’s new website reads.
His new conviction comes for embezzling funds he and his foundation have collected over the years and for insulting a judge during a previous trial. Navalny, who will appeal the verdict, rejects the allegations as politically motivated.
Germany condemned the verdict and its foreign ministry called it “part of the systematic exploitation of the Russian judiciary against dissidents and the political opposition”.
It was initially not clear whether Navalny would have to serve the new nine-year prison sentence in addition to the 2½ years or where he would serve it. Originally, the public prosecutor’s office demanded a prison sentence of 13 years. The judge also imposed a fine of 1.2 million rubles (about $11,500).
Navalny’s Twitter account responded to the nine-year sentence by quoting The Wire: “Well, as the characters of my favorite TV show The Wire used to say, ‘You only do two days. That’s the day you go in and the day you come out.” I even had a t-shirt with that slogan, but the prison authorities confiscated it because they thought the print was extremist.”
Even his lawyers, Olga Mikhailova and Vadim Kobzev, were arrested shortly after commenting on the verdict to reporters, although Mikhailova told the Medizona news agency that the police released them without charge.
Navalny’s supporters have criticized the decision to move the trial, which opened about a month ago, to prison instead of holding it in Moscow. They said it effectively restricted access to the proceedings for the media and supporters.
He appeared at hearings in prison garb and made several lengthy speeches denouncing the charges as false.
Navalny fell ill on a domestic flight in 2020 and was diagnosed with poisoning from the chemical nerve agent Novichok, though Russian officials have vehemently denied his allegations that they played any role. He was transferred to Germany for treatment, where he recovered for five months.
He was arrested on his return to Russia in January 2021, sparking the biggest protests in the country in recent years. The next month a Moscow court sentenced him to jail for violating the terms of his probation after being convicted in 2014 of embezzlement that the European Court of Human Rights deemed “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable”.
The authorities then unleashed a comprehensive crackdown on his organization, employees and supporters. Last month, Russian officials put him and a number of his colleagues on a state register, which labeled them extremists and terrorists.
Several criminal cases have been launched against Navalny, leading his associates to believe that the Kremlin intends to keep him behind bars indefinitely.
Navalny’s closest ally and longtime strategist Leonid Volkov tweeted from abroad on Tuesday that the plan would fail. “Putin is planning and has planned a lot of things: make Russia one of the top five economies in the world, take over Kyiv in 96 hours, kill Navalny with Novichok. His plans always failed. This also applies to these nine years,” said Volkov.