Another trial against Aleksei Navalni started yesterday, June 19. The Moscow City Court traveled 250 kilometers to the penal colony where the accused is. The Russian dissident has already served two years of a new sentence, and if he is found guilty after the new trial, he could spend several decades behind bars. In the middle of the first hearing, the judge banned the presence of the press and from now on 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 organization that attacks the rights of citizens,” in the ·lusion to his now banned Foundation for the Fight against Corruption. Navalny and his supporters claim these are accusations designed to remove him from politics and silence him, something the Kremlin denies.
The current trial is taking place in the maximum security prison colony IK-6, which is in Mélekhovo, about 250 kilometers east of Moscow and in the Putin Oblast.
In the same process, Daniel Kholodni, former technical director of the YouTube channel Navalni LIVE, is also on trial. He faces fifteen years in prison.
At the first hearing of the trial, the defense lawyers and Navalni himself complained about the place where it was held. The opponent asked why observers and the public were not allowed to enter the room. Journalists and the defendant’s parents themselves, Ludmila and Anatoli, followed what was happening on video from other departments of the prison.
In the future, the press will not be able to follow the process even in this way. The broadcast was abruptly stopped after the prosecutor, Nadezhda Tikhonova, asked Judge Andrei Suvórov to continue behind closed doors. First he said that secret data could be presented and then he alleged security reasons for alleged information according to which provocations were being prepared. Hours later, the magistrate decided to close the trial to the press.
Navalni’s lawyers objected, but to no avail. Vadim Kóbzev assured that “there is no safer place than where we are” and Olga Mikhailova assured that there are no State secrets in the case.
Navalny, who turned 47 this month, went to prison before the current armed conflict in Ukraine began in January 2021. However, the new charges against him are linked to the current crackdown on critical voices in Russia oppose military intervention in the neighboring country.
Most of the most prominent Russian opposition leaders who have not fled the country are imprisoned or on trial, mainly for criticizing Putin’s decision to send the army into Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Last week in the city of Ufa, Lilià Txànixeva, who led Navalni’s team in that city, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for “extremism”.
The opponent accuses the Russian authorities of wanting to keep him in prison because of his criticism. In fact, through his team, he continues to spread his political positions on social media, including on military intervention in Ukraine.
Just yesterday Navalny published, through his partners, a message on Instagram in which he asked the Russians to “join forces to fight Putin’s lies and the Kremlin’s hypocrisy”, and accused the Russian president of being “afraid of anyone word of”.
