Russian opponent Alexei Navalny, February 20, 2021 in Moscow. KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP
Russian prosecutors have requested thirteen years in prison for opponent Alexei Navalny, Tuesday, March 15. A nemesis of the Kremlin and the victim of an escalating crackdown on President Vladimir Putin’s critical voices at work in Russia, the 45-year-old anti-corruption activist has been on trial since mid-February within the very walls of his high-security prison. , 100 km east of Moscow, on charges of fraud and insulting a justice of the peace, which he considers fictitious.
It was from this impromptu trial behind bars that prosecutor Nadezhda Tikhonova requested a new harsh sentence for her opponent. “I ask you to impose a sentence of thirteen years in prison,” the prosecutor said, quoted by Russian news agencies. She also demanded an additional sanction of “two years of restriction of liberty” and a fine of 1.2 million rubles (9,500 euros at the current exchange rate).
In prison “until he or Vladimir Putin dies”
One of the opponent’s exiled lieutenants, Leonid Volkov, reacted immediately, saying that the indictment showed that the opponent would remain in prison “until either Vladimir Putin or Navalny is dead.”
“He is a completely innocent man who is on trial because he speaks the truth about Putin’s criminal regime,” Lyubov Sobol, another exiled associate of Mr Navalny, added on Twitter. Investigators accuse the opponent of embezzling millions of rubles in donations to his anti-corruption organizations and contempt of court during one of his previous hearings.
In 2020, Alexei Navalny, known for his viral investigations exposing the negligence and corruption of Russian elites, spent months in Germany for treatment after narrowly surviving a nerve agent poisoning he blames on Vladimir Putin.
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He was arrested in January 2021 upon his return to his country and sentenced to two and a half years in prison in an old fraud case from 2014. The verdict that caused a resonance in the West and sanctions against Moscow.
A call to protest for peace
In June 2021, Navalny’s main organizations were labeled “extremist”, leading to their closure and the prosecution of many of their activists. Many of them are now in exile. At the same time, the Russian authorities stepped up pressure on a number of opposition media and NGOs that criticize the authorities.
More recently, Alexei Navalny has spoken out against the Russian army’s advance into Ukraine and called on his supporters to demonstrate peacefully despite the risk of arrest and serious legal challenges. According to the specialized public organization OVD-Info, about 15,000 peaceful demonstrators have been arrested in protests across Russia since then.
With the start of the offensive in Ukraine, the Russian government tightened the screws even further by passing two laws providing for harsh prison terms for any exposure of the conflict. On the Internet, one of the last spaces for freedom of speech in Russia, the authorities are also continuing their efforts and have blocked the social networks Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, as well as several independent Russian-language media.
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