Correspondent in Moscow
The judicial steamroller has started up again against Alexei Navalny. The number one opponent of the Kremlin, imprisoned since 2021, was tried on Monday in his penal colony for a new case – the sixth since 2014 -, which could cost him thirty years in prison. A criminal stunner illustrating the patent will of the Russian authorities to break Navalny and, through him, any form of political opposition in the country, currently at war against kyiv. Alexei Navalny, who is already serving a nine-year prison sentence for “fraud”, – a conviction he considers “political” -, appeared on Monday under seven articles of the penal code, in particular “organization of an extremist community” , “financing of extremist activities” and “rehabilitation of Nazism” – a possible reference to his declarations in favor of Ukraine… In total, 196 volumes of 3828 pages, to which the defense had access only ten days before the trial, and constituting an indictment with vague contours that Navalny and his lawyers refute. “Although it is clear, judging by the thickness of the volumes, that I am a methodical and diligent criminal, it is impossible to understand precisely what I am accused of”, recently commented Mr. Navalny with irony.
On Tuesday, the opponent, who has just turned 47, appeared in front of the cameras in prisoner’s uniform, emaciated and with short hair, in the court room of the very high security penal colony IK-6 in Melekhovo, 250 km east of Moscow. At the start of the hearing, Alexeï Navalny spoke for three minutes to challenge the court’s right to try him in his place of detention and to demand the right for his parents to access the room. Journalists were not allowed in either, only allowed to follow the trial from another room in the penitentiary via a poor quality video broadcast.
This was abruptly interrupted, the prosecutor’s office explaining its decision to impose the closed session by “information on provocations in preparation”… According to his supporters, Mr. Navalny is subjected to particularly severe treatment in prison, where he is placed in solitary confinement on the slightest pretext. In a message published in early June, the opponent indicated that he had been sent for the 16th time to a disciplinary cell, where the detainees are alone and in even more drastic living conditions. Mr. Navalny also accuses the prison administration of harassing him by giving him, for example, a fellow prisoner with a viral infection and giving off a pestilential smell for not having washed for several days, or even forcing prisoners to listen to speeches. of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Guess who is the champion of listening to Putin’s speeches? Who listens to them for hours and falls asleep on them? Me, of course”, he wrote from his prison, with his sense of humor, which nothing will have damaged, not even a precarious health.
Alexei Navalny was imprisoned in January 2021, as soon as he returned from Germany where he was being treated for his poisoning which he attributes to Russian “services”.
Criminal cases have also been opened against his collaborators and his Foundation against Corruption (FBK), deemed extremist and liquidated. On June 14, Lilia Tchanycheva, 41, her representative in Oufa (Republic of Bashkiria), was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison. In early June, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ordered Russia to pay Navalny 40,000 euros in moral damages, finding that Moscow had failed to properly investigate his poisoning. A decision that Russia is unlikely to respect. Last April, the opponent revealed that he was threatened with a charge of “terrorism”: “I would allegedly commit terrorist attacks while I am in prison. The case will be heard by a military tribunal. I could be sentenced to life imprisonment there,” he said on the sidelines of one of his appearances.
For those in power, the goal is clearly to inflict on him a perpetual trial, if not a life sentence. “Clearly I would like not to wake up in this hole, but to have breakfast with my family, a kiss on the cheek from my children, open my presents and say ‘Wow, this is exactly what I was dreaming of’ “, wrote Alexeï Navalny, on his birthday, at the beginning of June. 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”.