Jailed Russian opposition leader Navalny gets another 19-year sentence

A Russian court on Friday sentenced jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny to a further 19 years in prison for supporting "extremism", a decision which intervenes in a context of intensification of the repression of dissent in Russia.

Mr. Navalny, whose anti-corruption investigations critical of the Kremlin have drawn popular support and infuriated Russia's top leadership, was already serving a nine-year sentence in a maximum-security penal colony east of Moscow.

Acquittals are extremely rare in Russian courts, especially against opposition figures. Mr Navalny and his supporters had predicted a harsh sentence, especially as the Kremlin in recent months has banned criticism of its war in Ukraine, stepped up the imprisonment of opposition voices and shut down liberal news media .

In the case decided on Friday, Mr. Navalny, 47, was charged with promoting terrorism, financing extremism and rehabilitating Nazism. Prosecutors had called on him to serve an additional 20 years in prison on top of his March conviction for fraud, a case that rights groups say was politically motivated.

Once At one time, a sentence of two decades for what is essentially dissent would have been considered unusually harsh. But the ruling was the latest in a series of extreme judgments.

In April Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian-British dissident and Washington Post contributor, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for treason, spreading "false" information and participating in an "undesirable organization". Mr. Kara-Murza lost an appeal of the decision this week.

Mr. Navalny and Western rights groups have denounced the charges against him as an attempt to silence dissent against President Vladimir V. Putin.

"The sentence will be long," Navalny said in a statement his organization posted on the Telegram app on Thursday ahead of the verdict. "Think why such a demonstratively huge sentence is necessary. Its main purpose is to intimidate. You not me. I will even say this: you personally, reading these lines," he added.

The latest charges against Mr. Navalny were presented to the Moscow District Court at the end of July, and the trial took place behind closed doors in the penal colony where he is held. His parents attempted to attend the proceedings but were refused entry, according to Mr Navalny's organization, which said his parents had not seen their son for over a year. p>

Mr. . Navalny nearly died in 2020 after being poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent, an episode he and Western officials described as an assassination attempt by the Kremlin. The Russian government has denied any involvement.

After receiving medical treatment in Germany, he returned the following year to Russia, where security forces took him away. detained.

His group, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, was later banned – declared an “extremist” group – and the Russian authorities began to crack down even more severely on its activities .

Two of Mr. Navalny's accomplices were sentenced in mid-July to prison terms of seven and a half years and two and a half years for...