Another trial against Alexéi Navalni began this Monday, June 19. The Moscow City Court has traveled 250 kilometers to the penal colony where the accused is being held. The Russian opponent has already served two years of a nine-year sentence, and if he is found guilty after the new process, he could spend several decades behind bars. The judge decided that the process will continue behind closed doors.
The most critical voice against Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin faces seven charges, including creating and financing an extremist organization, “rehabilitating” Nazism and “creating an NGO that violates the rights of citizens”, alluding to his today banned Anti-Corruption Foundation.
Navalni and his followers maintain that they are nothing more than accusations created to separate him from politics and silence him, something that the Kremlin denies.
In a message posted by his team on Twitter last month, Navalni reacted with his usual irony to the new charges: “Okay Alexei, you’re in real trouble now… The Attorney General’s office has sent me 3,828 pages describing all the crimes that I have committed while I was already incarcerated”.
The current judicial process takes place in the IK-6 maximum security penal colony, which is located in the town of Mélejovo, about 250 kilometers east of Moscow and in the Vladimir Oblast.
Previously, Navalni denounced that they had not allowed him to familiarize himself with the charges attributed to him, since in the punishment cell where he was, the prison officials only allowed him to have one of the 196 volumes of the accusation.
In the same process, the court judges Daniel Jolodni, former technical director of the opponent’s YouTube channel Navalni LIVE. The charges against him are lighter, “participation in an extremist society” and “financing of extremist activities”, which could lead to up to 15 years in prison.
Kholodni is being held in the Vladimir Central Prison, in the provincial capital, 160 kilometers away. From there he was transferred to Mélejovo for the start of the trial, according to the Mediazona portal.
In the first session of the trial, the defense lawyers and Navalni himself complained about the place where this process was organized. The opponent asked why observers and the public were not allowed to enter the room. The journalists and the defendant’s own parents, Ludmila and Anatoli, could follow what was happening there by video, but from other parts of the prison.
In the future the press will not be able to follow the process even in this way. According to Mediazona, the transmission stopped after the prosecutor, Nadezhda Tíjonova, asked judge Andrei Suvórov that the trial continue from now on behind closed doors due to the existence of secret data and alleged information that provocations were being prepared, received by an employee of the penal colony.
Hours later, the magistrate made the decision to close the trial to the press, informed the spokesman for the Court, Vadim Pazhelayev.
Navalni’s lawyers objected, but to no avail. Vadim Kóbzev assured that “there is no safer place than this where we are.” On her part, Olga Mikhailova emphasized that the process must be carried out in an open mode, and claimed that there are no state secrets in the case.
Alexei Navalny, who turned 47 this month, went to prison before the current armed conflict in Ukraine began in January 2021. Even so, the new charges against him are linked to the ongoing crackdown on critical voices in Russia. who oppose military intervention in the neighboring country.
Since then, most of the most prominent Russian opposition leaders who have not fled the country have been jailed or prosecuted, mainly for denouncing the war and criticizing Putin for sending the army on February 22, 2022.
Last week in the city of Ufa, one of Navalni’s collaborators, Lilia Chánisheva, who led the opposition team in that city, was sentenced for “extremism” to 7.5 years in prison.
Navalni survived in 2020 a poisoning that he attributes to the Kremlin, an accusation rejected by the Russian power. Known for his anti-corruption investigations of the Russian elite, he is already serving a nine-year prison sentence for fraud.
According to his lawyers and his team, the new accusations could mean up to 30 years in prison in this new process.
The opponent accuses the Russian authorities of wanting to keep him in prison for life as revenge for a critical position that has not ceased even while in jail, since he has made them public through his team or in the various trials he has attended since prison has had to face. Navalni continues to send his political positions to social networks, including on the military intervention in Ukraine.
