A former campaign manager for imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalni was sentenced Wednesday to seven years and six months in prison for “creating an extremist organization,” the human rights group OVD-Info reported. The decision was made by the court in Ufa, the capital of the Russian republic of Bashkortostan.
Lilia Chanisheva, a former coordinator of one of Navalni’s offices for the Bashkortostan region from the city of Ufa, in the southern Urals, was arrested in November 2021. The opponent was found guilty of creating an extremist organization and an organization non-governmental organization that violates the rights of citizens.
Chanisheva, whose trial was held behind closed doors, did not acknowledge her guilt and called her criminal prosecution politically motivated.
Navalni’s supporters reacted with outrage to the sentence. Lyubov Sobol, Navalni’s aide, claimed that President Vladimir Putin had “put one more hostage in a penal colony.”
The activist was the first detained among Navalni’s collaborators after the banning of Navalni’s organizations in 2021. In 2022 Chanisheva was included in the official Russian list of people linked to extremism and terrorism.
Navalni himself, Putin’s best-known opponent, is serving a sentence for a total of 11 and a half years in a penal colony that was imposed on him for fraud and contempt, and faces another sentence of up to 30 years in prison for a new case. for extremism. Human rights groups and Western countries consider Navalny a political prisoner. The Kremlin denies this, systematically refusing to comment on his case and referring questions about him to the courts and the prison service.
