A Russian court on Tuesday sentenced prominent Kremlin critic and opposition leader Alexei Navalny to three and a half years in prison, officially over multiple violations of a 2014 suspended sentence for fraud charges. The court gave him credit for about a year of the sentence that he had already served under house arrest in 2014 and said that he would be required to spend another two years and eight months behind bars.
Navalny decried the charges against him as completely fabricated and accused Russian premier Vladimir Putin of being directly responsible for his persecution. Navalny has only recently recovered from a Novichok nerve agent poisoning, which he says was an assassination attempt ordered by the leader himself. The Kremlin has consistently denied these claims.
“I have deeply offended him simply by surviving the assassination attempt that he ordered,” Navalny said, adding, “The aim of that hearing is to scare a great number of people. You can’t jail the entire country.”
As for the 2014 case, in which Navalny and his brother Oleg were convicted of embezzling $500,000 from two Russian firms, his defence team noted that it was ruled as arbitrary and unreasonable by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in October 2017, and that Russia even compensated the brothers in line with that ruling. However, on Tuesday, the Moscow City Court found Navalny guilty of breaching his parole while he was undergoing treatment in Germany at the end of last year. He has been in detention since his return to Russia on January 17.
The conviction came just days after tens of thousands of citizens staged some of the biggest protests since Soviet rule across the country over the weekend to demand the anti-corruption campaigner’s release and condemn Putin’s rule. Police detained over 5,750 people on Sunday, and more than 230 on Tuesday as his supporters gathered outside the court.
Navalny’s treatment by Russia has been harshly criticized by the international community, and more than a dozen Western diplomats attended the hearing. Russia’s foreign ministry said that their presence only further highlighted the West’s attempts to interfere in Moscow’s domestic affairs. Following the court’s verdict, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken once again called for his “immediate and unconditional release” along with that of those “wrongfully detained for exercising their rights.”
The United States is deeply concerned by Russia’s actions toward Aleksey Navalny. We reiterate our call for his immediate and unconditional release as well as the release of all those wrongfully detained for exercising their rights.
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) February 2, 2021
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab also denounced Tuesday’s ruling, arguing that it showed that Russia is “failing to meet the most basic commitments expected of any responsible member of the international community.” Likewise, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Navalny’s sentencing is a “bitter blow to firmly established civil liberties and the rule of law” and that he “must be released immediately”.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov responded saying Moscow is ready for dialogue about Navalny, but sternly warned that it would not tolerate Western criticism on the matter. “We are ready to patiently explain everything, but we aren’t going to react to mentor-style statements or take them into account,” Peskov said in a conference call with reporters.