President Putin’s critic Alexei Navalny sentenced to 9 years in prison

President Putin’s critic Alexei Navalny sentenced to 9 years in prison

Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny has been sentenced to nine years in a maximum-security jail on Tuesday 22.

 

The prominent Kremlin critic was convicted on fraud charges by Moscow’s Lefortovo court over allegations that he stole from his Anti-Corruption Foundation.

 

 

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Navalny, 45, is currently serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence in a detention center east of the Russian capital after being arrested in February 2021 for violating probation terms, a verdict he said was politically motivated.

 

After Tuesday’s sentence was announced, Navalny wrote on Twitter: “9 years. Well, as the characters of my favorite TV series ‘The Wire’ used to say: ‘You only do two days. That’s the day you go in and the day you come out.'”

 

 

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He added: “I even had a T-shirt with this slogan, but the prison authorities confiscated it, considering the print extremist.”

 

The Russian state-owned news agency RIA reported that Navalny, who was also fined 1.2 million rubles (roughly $11,500), will appeal the guilty verdict, according to his lawyer.

 

Tuesday’s sentence was handed down at the Pokrov penal colony by a visiting session of the Lefortovo court.

 

While Judge Margarita Kotova read out the accusations against him,  Navalny appeared unmoved by the proceedings, looking through some court documents on a table in front of him.

 

After the trial, Olga Mikhailova and Vadim Kobzev, two lawyers acting for the opposition leader, were driven away in a prison van, RIA reported, before they were released a short time afterwards.

 

According to the news agency, the lawyers were initially taken away for failing to comply with demands to unblock the road after the court session.

 

 

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Navalny was first detained in February 2021 after his arrival in Moscow from Berlin, Germany, where he had spent several months recovering from poisoning with nerve agent Novichok — an attack he blames on Russian security services and on Russian President Vladimir Putin himself.