The Russian prosecutor’s office has demanded another 20 years in prison for Alexei Navalny. This was announced by the team of the already imprisoned opposition figure on Thursday. The verdict is due to be announced on August 4, according to his supporters.
An acquittal is considered highly unlikely. Court documents show that the allegations relate to six different articles of the Russian Criminal Code, including inciting and financing extremist activities, founding an extremist organization and trivializing Nazism.
The trial began in camera in June in a penal camp in Melekhovo, about 235 kilometers east of Moscow, where Navalny is already being held. He has been behind bars for more than two years. The prominent opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin has already been sentenced to a total of eleven and a half years in a penal colony, among other things for fraud. The 47-year-old dismisses the allegations as fictitious and argues they were only used to silence him. Human rights groups and Western governments consider Navalny a political prisoner. The leadership in Moscow denies this.
Navalny is combative and criticizes impunity for Wagner mercenaries
According to his supporters, Navalny was inflexible in court. “I continue to fight against the ruthless evil that calls itself ‘the state power of the Russian Federation’,” he said, according to a speech. He is accused of inciting hatred against the authorities, judges and the United Russia party. This is not true, said Navalny. He only reminds that man has both a conscience and an intellect. Those who give up their conscience also lose their intellect in the long term. At the beginning of the process, Navalny called on the Russians to “join forces to fight Putin’s lies and the Kremlin’s hypocrisy.”
Anyone seeking justice in a court in Russia is completely at the mercy of the judicial system. “For in a country ruled by a criminal, disputes are settled through negotiation, power, bribery, fraud, treachery and other real-life mechanisms and not through any kind of law.” In court, Navalny cited the brief uprising of the Wagner mercenary army on June 24 as an example of the criminal state system under Putin. Although the insurgents killed Russian pilots, they went unpunished.
Navalny was arrested in January 2021 after his return to Russia. In August 2020 he collapsed on a flight within Russia. First he was treated in Russia, then transferred to the Berlin Charité. There, poisoning with a nerve agent was determined. The government in Moscow had denied allegations that Russian authorities had tried to kill him.