Vladimir Putin’s jailed political opponent Alexei Navalny has had an extra 19 years added to his jail term, in his latest trial on extremism charges.
Navalny received the additional jail term on Friday, in a criminal case he and his supporters said was trumped up to keep him behind bars and out of politics for even longer.
Navalny, 47, President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest domestic critic, is already serving sentences totalling 11 and a half years on fraud and other charges that he says are also bogus. His political movement has been outlawed and declared “extremist”.
A court at the IK-6 penal colony in Melekhovo, around 145 miles east of Moscow where he is serving his sentences, tried him on Friday on six separate criminal charges, including inciting and financing extremist activity and creating an extremist organisation.
The audio feed from the court was so poor that it was almost impossible to make out what the judge was saying, according to news agency Reuters.
Dressed in his dark prison uniform and flanked by his lawyers, Navalny smiled at times as he listened to the judge.
Navalny’s team said the judge had added 19 years to his sentences as a result of the new charges. State prosecutors had asked the court to hand him another 20 years in a penal colony.
In a message posted on social media a day earlier Navalny had predicted he would get a long jail term, but had said it did not really matter because he was also threatened with separate terrorism charges that could bring another decade.
“It’s going to be a long sentence. What is called ‘Stalinist’,” said Navalny, who is able to post on social media via his supporters and lawyers, ahead of his hearing.
In the statement, Navalny called on Russians to “personally” resist and encouraged them to support political prisoners, distribute flyers or go to a rally.
He told Russians that they could choose a safe way to resist, but he added that “there is shame in doing nothing. It’s shameful to let yourself be intimidated”.
Navalny is already serving a nine-year sentence for fraud and contempt of court. He also was sentenced in 2021 to two and a half years in prison for a parole violation. The extremism trial has taken place behind closed doors in the penal colony east of Moscow where he is imprisoned.
He was arrested in January 2021 upon returning to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin.
The opposition leader is being held at a maximum-security penal colony at Melekhovo and appeared in court last month, facing new allegations of creating an extremist organisation. If found guilty, he could be jailed for up to 30 years.
In a ruling earlier this year, the European Court of Human Rights found that Russia had “notably” failed to investigate Mr Navalny’s 2020 poisoning.
The court said Russia had failed “to explore the allegations of a possible political motive for the attempted murder, as well as possible involvement of state agents.”
