Russian prosecutors at the trial of opposition leader Alexey Navalny are seeking to jail him for 20 more years, according to allies of President Vladimir Putin’s most outspoken critic.
(Bloomberg) — Russian prosecutors at the trial of opposition leader Alexey Navalny are seeking to jail him for 20 more years, according to allies of President Vladimir Putin’s most outspoken critic.
A Russian court that’s hearing an “extremism” case against Navalny inside a strict-regime prison set an Aug. 4 hearing to announce the verdict in the trial, the state-run Tass news service reported Thursday, citing his lawyer Olga Mikhailova.
The prosecution in the closed court has asked for a sentence of 20 years in a special regime prison, Maria Pevchikh, head of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation said on Twitter. Another Navalny ally, Ivan Zhdanov, posted a similar message on Telegram.
Navalny faces almost certain conviction on charges of founding an “extremist” group and six other related criminal counts. He’s already serving a nine-year term for fraud and contempt of court that was imposed after he returned to Russia in early 2021 following treatment in Germany for a nerve-agent poisoning in Siberia that he and Western governments blamed on the Kremlin. Russian authorities denied responsibility.
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Navalny, 47, had been in detention for almost half a year when authorities outlawed his organizations as “extremist” in mid-2021 and crushed his network of activists. Most of his top aides fled Russia to avoid arrest.
He and his supporters have continued to face a relentless crackdown by the authorities since Putin ordered the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
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