Russia on Friday sentenced three lawyers who had defended Alexey Navalny to several years in prison for bringing messages from the late opposition leader from prison to the outside world.
The sentences come as Russia — in the midst of a massive crackdown during its Ukraine offensive — seeks to punish Navalny’s associates since his unexplained death in an Arctic prison colony last February.
Vadim Kobzev, Alexei Liptser and Igor Sergunin — who were arrested in October 2023 — were found guilty of participating in an “extremist organization,” a court in the Russian town of Petushki ruled.
Kobzev, the most high-profile member of Navalny’s legal team, was given 5.5 years, while Liptser was handed five years and Sergunin 3.5 years.
While serving his 19-year sentence, Navalny communicated with the world by transmitting messages through his lawyers which his team then published on social media.
Authorities had moved him to a harsher prison regime that limited outside contact, before sending him to a remote colony above the Arctic Circle where he died.
“We are on trial for passing Navalny’s thoughts to other people,” Kobzev said in court last week.
The court said the men had “used their status as lawyers while visiting convict Navalny … to ensure the regular transfer of information between the members of the extremist community, including those wanted and hiding outside the Russian Federation, and Navalny.”
‘Outrageous’
It said this allowed Navalny to continue “planning the preparation and creating conditions for committing crimes with an extremist character.”
Navalny had condemned the arrests of the lawyers as “outrageous” and part of a campaign to further isolate him in jail.
The court proceedings, which opened in September in Petushki, a town about 115 kilometers east of Moscow, have been held behind closed doors.
The verdicts come several days before four independent journalists accused of helping Navalny will be back in court, facing up to six years in prison.
In his messages to the outside world, Navalny denounced the Kremlin’s Ukraine offensive as “criminal” and told supporters “not to give up.”
The texts from prison were also full of tongue-in-cheek dispatches of daily life behind bars.
In his speech last week, Kobzev compared Moscow’s current crackdown on dissent to Stalin-era mass repression.
“Eight years have passed… and in the Petushki court, people are once again on trial for discrediting officials and the state agencies,” he said, in a speech published by the Novaya Gazeta newspaper.
‘Savage’ sentences
Another member of Navalny’s former legal team, Olga Mikhailova, who is in exile, denounced the requested sentences as “savage,” saying the men had “honestly and professionally defended Navalny for many years.”
Navalny’s wife Yulia Navalnaya has vowed to continue his work.
Last week, she said Russia has refused to remove her dead husband from its list of terrorists and extremists.
She published a Dec. 16 letter from Russia’s financial watchdog Rosfinmonitoring addressed to Navalny’s mother that said that the late opposition leader was still being investigated for money laundering and “financing terrorism.”
“Why does Putin need this? Obviously not to stop Alexei from opening a bank account. That is now impossible,” Navalnaya said.
“Putin is doing this to scare you. He wants you to be scared of even mentioning Alexei and for you to gradually forget his name.”
Russia has added Navalnaya to the “terrorists and extremists” blacklist.
In 2021, Moscow banned Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, known for investigations into the alleged corruption of Putin’s officials, labeling it “extremist.”
He nearly died in 2020 after being poisoned on a campaign trip to Siberia ahead of regional elections.
The West and Moscow were in talks about freeing Navalny in a prisoner exchange when he died. Several of his associates were later freed in the eventual deal.
