A new conviction awaits Alexei Navalny this Friday. The main opponent of the Kremlin, who is already serving a 9-year sentence, appeared again on June 19 for “extremism”. This case – the sixth since 2014 – concerns his Anti-Corruption Fund (FBK), through which the combative political activist had carried out investigations into the corruption of Vladimir Putin’s system. Taxed as an “extremist organization”, this fund was liquidated in 2021.
For this crime, the prosecution requested 20 years in prison. In a message broadcast by his relatives, the 47-year-old opponent said Thursday to expect a “long, Stalinist sentence”. “The formula for calculating it is simple: what the prosecutor asked for, minus 10-15%. They asked for 20 years, they will give 18 or something like that, ”he said in a message posted on the internet by his relatives.
The opponent accumulates convictions. In early 2021, he was imprisoned upon his return to Russia, after surviving in extremis poisoning which he attributes to the Russian security services acting on the orders of the master of the Kremlin. Sentenced in June 2022 in a case of fraud which he describes as political revenge, the activist has already been sentenced to 9 years in prison. In all, he was sent to a punishment cell 17 times, where he was forced to listen to speeches by Vladimir Putin.
It is in one of these cells that he awaits his verdict, punished by 13 days of solitary confinement for having “mispresented himself” to his guards, explained his lawyer Vadim Kobzev on Twitter, renamed X.
This last trial took place behind closed doors, in the IK-6 penal colony of Melekhovo, 250 kilometers east of Moscow, where Alexei Navalny is incarcerated. The anti-corruption activist appeared under seven articles of the criminal code, including “organizing an extremist community”, “financing extremist activities” and “rehabilitating Nazism” – a possible reference to his statements in favor of Ukraine. In total, 196 volumes of 3828 pages, to which the defense only had access ten days before the trial.
During the hearing, Alexei Navalny once again mocked the war in Ukraine, evoking “tens of thousands of deaths in the most stupid and senseless war of the 21st century”. “Sooner or later (Russia) will rise again. And it is up to us to know what it will be based on in the future”.
After the verdict expected on Friday evening, his conditions of detention could however still worsen. Indeed, the prosecution calls for his transfer to a penal colony of “special regime”, the prisons with the most sinister reputation in Russia, usually reserved for the most dangerous criminals and lifers.
Alexei Navalny’s legal marathon may not stop there. He says he is also being prosecuted for a case of “terrorism” in another procedure, of which few details are known at this stage but for which he risks life in prison. On his birthday in early June, Alexeï Navalny wrote: “It is clear that I would like not to wake up in this hole, but to have breakfast with the family, a kiss on the cheek of my children, open my presents and say ‘Wow, that’s exactly what I was dreaming of’”. But, he added, a “better future” is only possible “if a certain number of people are ready to pay for the right to have convictions”.