A Russian court opened a new trial of jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny on Monday that he and his supporters say could add another 30 years to his prison sentence.
A judge began the hearing inside the strict-regime prison colony where Navalny is already serving a nine-year term for fraud and contempt of court. Russian prosecutors have now charged him with founding an “extremist” group and six other related criminal counts.
Journalists who traveled to the prison about 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of Moscow were barred from the courtroom and permitted to watch proceedings only via a video link in a separate building. Navalny’s parents were also refused entry to the court, the Mediazona news website reported.
Navalny, 47, had already been in detention for almost half a year when authorities outlawed his organizations as “extremist” in mid-2021 and crushed his network of activists.
“The Prosecutor General’s Office has officially provided me with 3,828 pages describing all the crimes I’ve committed while already imprisoned,” Navalny said on his Twitter account May 26, adding that he’s “facing up to 30 years or more” under the charges.
Navalny faces almost certain conviction. He said last month that prison authorities confiscated the indictment because he’s not allowed to read it in the punishment cell where he’s been held most of the time since last August.
In an April message on his team’s Twitter account, Navalny cited an investigator as saying he would also be tried in a separate terrorism case that carries a life sentence and would be heard by a military court
The top Kremlin critic and his supporters have continued to face a relentless crackdown by the authorities since President Vladimir Putin ordered the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Last week, Liliya Chanysheva, former Navalny coordinator in the central Russian city of Ufa, was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison for “extremism.”
Most of Navalny’s top aides fled Russia to avoid arrest. They accuse officials of trying to destroy his health by repeatedly locking him in a tiny cell for alleged violations of prison rules.
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Navalny, who survived a chemical poisoning in August 2020 that he and Western governments blamed on the Kremlin, became popular through a series of anti-corruption investigations. He led the largest anti-Putin protests of the president’s long rule in 2011-2012.
