A Russian court on Tuesday sentenced opposition leader Alexei Navalny to nine years in prison after what international observers decried as a "sham" trial.
Navalny was imprisoned last year after Western intelligence officials said Russian agents tried to assassinate him with poison, a tactic the Kremlin has reportedly employed numerous times against perceived opponents of President Vladimir Putin. (Russia denies this.) Navalny, who was arrested dozens of times for leading protests against the Putin regime, was serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence after Russian prosecutors accused him of violating his parole by failing to report to authorities, including while he was recovering from the poisoning in Germany.
