A Catholic bishop in western Germany compared the treatment of late Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny to the trial of Jesus before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, in comments to mark the Easter holiday of Good Friday.
According to the Bible, Jesus was presented to the people and then taken back inside the governor’s palace, where he was hidden from public view.
“When the Russian dissenter and fighter for freedom and peace, Alexei Navalny, died weeks ago, this is exactly what came to my mind,” Bishop Franz-Josef Overbeck said on Friday at a former colliery in Bottrop, north of Essen, according to a speech text distributed in advance.
“After he was arrested in the worst possible way, he was locked up inside, in detention centres, court buildings and ultimately in an inhumane gulag in the polar ice,” he said.
The rest of the world would see “his message of freedom” in eternity, the bishop said.
Navalny, the best-known Russian opposition figure, died on February 16 in a prison camp in the Arctic Circle in Siberia. It has not been independently established whether the 47-year-old died as a result of the prison conditions or whether he was killed.
On Good Friday, Christians all over the world commemorate the execution of Jesus on the cross.
Authorities in Russia have detained six journalists across the country this month, including a journalist who covered the trials of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny for several years, media freedom organization Reporters Without Borders said Thursday.
Antonina Favorskaya was detained and accused by Russian authorities of taking part in an “extremist organization” by posting on the social media platforms of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, the Russian human rights group OVD-Info said. Navalny died in an Arctic penal colony in February.
Favorskaya covered Navalny’s court hearings for years and filmed the last video of Navalny before he died in the penal colony. She is one of several Russian journalists targeted by authorities as part of a sweeping crackdown against dissent in Russia that is aimed at opposition figures, journalists, activists and members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Two other journalists, Alexandra Astakhova and Anastasia Musatova, were also temporarily detained after they came to meet Favorskaya in the detention center where she was being held, Reporters Without Borders said, adding that their homes were searched and equipment seized.
Ekaterina Anikievich, of the Russian news site SOTAvision, and Konstantin Yarov from RusNews, were also detained by police while covering the search of Favorskaya’s home. Yarov was beaten by police, threatened with sexual violence and taken to a hospital, Reporters Without Borders said. Yarov is accused of “disobedience” towards police and risks 15 days of detention, the group said.
In Ufa, 1,300 kilometers (around 800 miles) east of Moscow, Russian authorities detained Olga Komleva, a reporter for RusNews, on Wednesday. They also accused her of extremism and involvement with Navalny and his organization, Reporters Without Borders said.
OVD-Info said that Favorskaya was initially detained on March 17 after laying flowers on Navalny’s grave. She spent 10 days in jail after being accused of disobedience towards the police, but when that period of detention ended, authorities charged her again and ordered her to appear Friday in Moscow’s Basmanny District Court, OVD-Info said.
Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation has been designated an extremist organization by Russian authorities, which means that people associated with it potentially face prison sentences if they continue to be involved in its work.
Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s spokeswoman, said that Favorskaya didn’t publish anything on the Foundation’s platforms and suggested that Russian authorities targeted her because she was doing her job as a journalist.
“What darkness,” Yarmysh wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
VIENNA (AP) — Two large portraits of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny have been spray-painted on a property owned by the family of a former Czech foreign minister behind a monument to Soviet soldiers in Vienna.
The portraits were completed Wednesday on the wall behind the monument, which was already painted in Ukraine’s blue and yellow national colors after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The wall belongs to the Palais Schwarzenberg, owned by the noble family of former Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, who died in November.
The monument portraying a Soviet soldier was built after Soviet troops took Vienna in 1945. Austria, which was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, was divided into occupation zones until the country was granted full sovereignty in 1955.
“The monument commemorates victims of dictatorship and Mr. Navalny is an obvious victim of dictatorship,” Maximillian Schaffgotsch of the Schwarzenberg family foundation told the Austria Press Agency.
Navalny, who crusaded against official corruption in Russia and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests as President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe, died Feb. 16 in the Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence. Officials have said only that he died of natural causes.
Austrian graffiti duo Joel Gamnou painted the portraits. Jonathan Gamperl, one half of the duo, said that “so far we have only gotten positive feedback.”
KSORS, a group described by Austrian media as being close to the Russian Embassy, complained in a Facebook post that the wall behind the monument to Soviet soldiers is being “misused for political purposes.”
An improvised memorial to Navalny opposite the embassy has been removed twice in the last two weeks. Vienna prosecutors are considering whether to open an investigation into those incidents, APA reported.
Alexey Navalny: The 2020 60 Minutes Interview – CBS News
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Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny was sentenced to 19 more years in prison on extremism charges today. Lesley Stahl spoke with Navalny in 2020. “I don’t feel any fear,” he told 60 Minutes after surviving an assassination attempt by poisoning.
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MELEKHOVO, Russia (AP) — A Russian court convicted imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny on charges of extremism and sentenced him to 19 years in prison on Friday. Navalny is already serving a nine-year term on a variety of charges that he says were politically motivated.
The new charges are related to the activities of Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation and statements by his top associates. It was his fifth criminal conviction and his third and longest prison term — all of which his supporters see as a deliberate Kremlin strategy to silence its most ardent opponent.
Russian state news agencies said he would serve this new term concurrently with his current sentence on charges of fraud and contempt of court. Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh told The Associated Press it’s the most likely scenario but that his team has not seen the text of the verdict yet.
The prosecution had demanded a 20-year prison sentence, and Navalny said beforehand that he expected to receive a lengthy term.
He was also sentenced in 2021 to two and a half years in prison for a parole violation. The extremism trial took place behind closed doors in the penal colony east of Moscow where Navalny is imprisoned.
Navalny appeared in the courtroom wearing prison garb and looking gaunt, but with a defiant smile on his face. As the judge read out the verdict, the politician stood alongside his lawyers and his co-defendant with his arms crossed, listening with a serious expression on his face.
It took the judge less than 10 minutes to announce the verdict and the sentence — something that in Russia usually takes hours and even days. The hearing was broadcast to reporters in a separate room, but the judge’s speech was barely audible.
Navalny commented on the sentence in a social media post, presumably relayed through his team, saying that “the number doesn’t matter.”
“I understand perfectly that, as many political prisoners, I’m serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime,” Navalny said, urging his supporters “not to lose the will to resist” in the wake of his sentence.
Yarmysh confirmed the verdict to the AP, adding that Navalny was also ordered to pay a fine of 500,000 rubles (about $5,200). She said that Navalny feels optimistic despite the harsh sentence, and “absolutely believes in what he’s doing,” adding that “it certainly helps him cope with all that and keep doing what he’s doing.”
The U.S. State Department condemned Navalny’s new sentence as “an unjust conclusion to an unjust trial” and called for his immediate release.
“For years, the Kremlin has attempted to silence Navalny and prevent his calls for transparency and accountability from reaching the Russian people,” it said. “By conducting this latest trial in secret and limiting his lawyers’ access to purported evidence, Russian authorities illustrated yet again both the baselessness of their case and the lack of due process afforded to those who dare to criticize the regime.”
The 47-year-old Navalny is President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe and has exposed official corruption and organized major anti-Kremlin protests. He was arrested in January 2021 upon returning to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin.
Navalny’s allies said the extremism charges retroactively criminalized all of the anti-corruption foundation’s activities since its creation in 2011. In 2021, Russian authorities outlawed the foundation and the vast network of Navalny’s offices in Russian regions as extremist organizations, exposing anyone involved to possible prosecution.
U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk said Navalny’s new sentence “raises renewed serious concerns about judicial harassment and instrumentalisation of the court system for political purposes in Russia” and called for his release.
One of Navalny’s associates, Daniel Kholodny, stood trial alongside him after being relocated from a different prison. His lawyer told the independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper that Kholodny was sentenced to eight years in prison.
Navalny rejected all the charges against him as politically motivated and accused the Kremlin of seeking to keep him behind bars for life.
On the eve of the verdict hearing, Navalny released a statement on social media, presumably through his team, in which he said he expected his latest sentence to be “huge … a Stalinist term.” Under the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, millions of people were branded “enemies of the state,” jailed and sometimes executed in what became known as the “Great Terror.”
In his statement, Navalny called on Russians to “personally” resist and encouraged them to support political prisoners, distribute flyers or go to a rally. He told Russians that they could choose a safe way to resist, but he added that “there is shame in doing nothing. It’s shameful to let yourself be intimidated.”
The politician is currently serving his sentence in a maximum-security prison — Penal Colony No. 6 in the town of Melekhovo, about 230 kilometers (more than 140 miles) east of Moscow.
He has spent months in a tiny one-person cell, also called a “punishment cell,” for purported disciplinary violations, such as an alleged failure to button his prison clothes properly, introduce himself appropriately to a guard or to wash his face at a specified time.
Yarmysh said that prison officials once again placed Navalny in the punishment cell right after his closing arguments in late July, and that he was released from it only on Friday for the verdict hearing.
On social media, Navalny’s associates urged supporters to come to Melekhovo on Friday to express solidarity with the politician.
About 40 supporters from different Russian cities gathered outside the colony, one of them told the AP in the messaging app Telegram. Yelena, who spoke on condition that her last name was withheld for safety reasons, said the supporters weren’t allowed into the colony, but decided to stay outside until the verdict as announced: “People think it’s important to be nearby at least like that, for moral support. We will be waiting.”
Navalny was ordered to serve the new prison term in a “special regime” penal colony, a term that refers to the Russian prisons with the highest level of security and the harshest inmate restrictions.
It wasn’t immediately clear when he would be transferred to such a colony from the Melekhovo prison. Yarmysh said Navalny’s lawyers will definitely appeal the verdict, so it will not take effect until the appeal is ruled on.
Russian law stipulates that only men given life sentences or “especially dangerous recidivists” are sent to those types of prisons.
The country has many fewer “special regime” colonies compared to other types of adult prisons, according to state penitentiary service data: 35 colonies for “dangerous recidivists” and six for men imprisoned for life. Maximum-security colonies are the most widespread type, with 251 currently in operation.
Still, Navalny is “always in this optimistic spirit,” Yarmysh said. “It seems to me that he is probably the biggest optimist among all of us,” she added. “This happens because Alexei is absolutely convinced in what he’s doing and confident that he is right. This, of course, helps him cope with everything and continue doing what he does.”
___
Associated Press writers Dasha Litvinova in Tallinn, Estonia, and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
MELEKHOVO, Russia (Reuters) -Jailed Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny was sentenced on Friday to an additional 19 years in prison after being found guilty on a series of new charges, Navalny’s supporters said on social media.
In a video feed from a court hearing at a penal colony east of Moscow, Navalny could be seen wearing a black prison uniform and standing with his arms folded as he listened to the verdicts.
The audio feed from the court was so poor that it was practically impossible to make out what the judge was saying.
Navalny, the most prominent opponent of President Vladimir Putin, is already serving 11-1/2 years in the penal colony on charges including fraud that he says were trumped up to silence him.
He had predicted on the eve of the verdict that he would receive a “Stalinist” sentence of about 18 more years.
The battery of new charges related to alleged extremist activity by the 47-year-old politician.
(Reporting by Reuters, writing by Mark TrevelyanEditing by Gareth Jones)
A Russian court sentenced jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny to a 19-year prison term Friday, convicting the one-time blogger and anti-corruption crusader on charges of supporting “extremism.”
The latest criminal conviction against Navalny — his fifth in total — came from a courtroom in a penal colony about 150 miles east of Moscow, where he is already serving a nine-year prison sentence. Navalny and his supporters have repeatedly criticized his criminal convictions as politically motivated and described them as attempts by Russian President Vladimir Putin to silence his archenemy.
Navalny, 47, has been held behind bars since January 2021.
Navalny was poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in the Siberian city of Tomsk in August 2020, and later evacuated to Berlin for medical care. After spending more than one week in a coma and recovering from the assassination attempt, Navalny returned to Moscow on Jan. 17, 2021, and was arrested at passport control for violating the terms of his parole.
Navalny’s prison sentence on Friday was one year less than the 20 years requested by prosecutors, but it was still by far the lengthiest term handed to Navalny.
The conviction was related to the work of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a group founded by Navalny in 2011 to expose alleged corruption by high-ranking Russian officials.
The Anti-Corruption Foundation has produced several investigations that revealed wrongdoing and corruption by senior Russian government officials and figures. Targets of the group’s investigations included Putin, former President Dmitry Medvedev, and Wagner boss Yevgeniy Prigozhin.
In a statement published Thursday on social media, a day before the sentencing, Navalny called on his fellow Russian citizens to “resist” the Kremlin by supporting political prisoners, donating to the Anti-corruption foundation, or attending a political rally.
“There is no shame in choosing the safest way to resist,” wrote Navalny, acknowledging the Kremlin’s crackdown on political dissent.
“There is shame in doing nothing,” Navalny added. “It’s shameful to let yourself be intimidated.”
Navalny says charges are politically motivated and bogus
*
Kremlin says case is a purely legal matter for courts alone
(Updates h/line, adds U.S. reaction in paragraph 14)
By Tatiana Gomozova and Andrew Osborn
MELEKHOVO, Russia, Aug 4 (Reuters) – Jailed Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny had an extra 19 years added to his jail term on Friday in a criminal case that he and his supporters said had been trumped up to keep him behind bars and out of politics for even longer.
Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest domestic critic, is already serving sentences totalling 11-1/2 years on fraud and other charges that he says are also bogus. His political movement has been outlawed and declared “extremist”.
A court at his IK-6 penal colony in Melekhovo, about 235 km (145 miles) east of Moscow, on Friday brought to a close his trial on six separate charges, including inciting and financing extremist activity and creating an extremist organisation.
The audio feed from the court, where the trial had been held behind closed doors in the prison’s sports hall, was so poor that it was practically impossible to make out what the judge, Andrei Suvorov, was saying.
Journalists were not let into the courtroom but able to watch proceedings on CCTV from a special media room nearby, although the feed was cut almost as soon as the sentence was pronounced.
Navalny’s team said the judge had added 19 years to his existing terms. State prosecutors had asked for 20.
Unconfirmed Russian media reports said that Navalny, now 47, would be 74 years old by the time he got out of prison in 2050.
Dressed in dark prison uniform and flanked by his lawyers, Navalny smiled occasionally as he listened to the judge.
The former blogger, lawyer and corruption investigator has cast himself as a political martyr whose aim is to demonstrate to Russians that it is possible to resist Putin, albeit at great cost.
“For a new, free, rich country to be born, it must have parents. Those who want it. Who expect it and who are willing to make sacrifices for its birth,” Navalny said in his closing statement last month.
In a message posted on social media on Thursday, Navalny had predicted he would get a long jail term, but said it hardly mattered because he was also threatened with separate terrorism charges that could bring another decade.
Navalny said the purpose of giving him extra jail time was to frighten Russians, but urged them not to be cowed and to think hard about how best to resist what he called the “villains and thieves in the Kremlin”.
The charges relate to his role in his now defunct movement inside Russia, which the authorities accused of trying to foment a revolution by seeking to destabilise the socio-political situation.
The U.S. State Department called the verdict “an unjust conclusion to an unjust trial”, while the European Union condemned what it called another politically motivated ruling and called for Navalny’s immediate release.
U.N. Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said the sentence raised renewed serious concerns about judicial harassment and the use of the court system for political purposes in Russia. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called it “sheer injustice”.
A small group of Navalny supporters had gathered outside the penal colony but were not let in to hear the verdict.
PUTIN DEMANDS UNITY
Putin, in power since 1999, is expected to run for another six-year presidential term in 2024. With Russia waging what he calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine and locked in what he describes as an existential battle with the West, Putin says it is vital for the country to remain united.
In February, Putin ordered the FSB security service to raise its game to “identify and stop the illegal activities of those who are trying to divide and weaken our society”.
Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser, questioned whether Navalny’s treatment was too harsh.
“Isn’t this a bit much? Why such cruelties?,” Markov wrote on the Telegram app. “He’s not a murderer.”
Navalny, who in the 2010s brought tens of thousands of people onto the streets to oppose Putin’s rule, was detained in January 2021 after returning to Moscow from Germany, where he had been treated for what Western experts said was poisoning by a Soviet-era nerve agent.
The Kremlin, which at one point accused him of working with the CIA to undermine Russia, denied involvement and denies persecuting Navalny. It has portrayed him as an agent of disruption and says he never represented serious political competition, and that his case is purely a matter for the courts.
Navalny’s supporters cast him as a Russian version of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela who will one day be freed from prison to govern the country.
(Reporting by Tatiana Gomozova and Andrew Osborn; Additional reporting by Mark Trevelyan, Paul Grant, Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber and Gabriela Baczynska; Editing by Gareth Jones, Conor Humphries and Kevin Liffey)
Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny is facing an even longer stint in jail after being sentenced to 19 years in prison on extremism charges, Russian media report, a fresh blow to a fierce critic of Russia’s President Putin that comes amid an intensifying crackdown on dissent.
Navalny was accused of creating an extremist community, financing extremist activities and a number of other crimes.
He was found guilty on Friday at the high-security penal colony in which he has been detained.
Navalny is already serving sentences totaling 11-and-a-half years in a maximum security facility on fraud and other charges that he says were trumped up.
He and his supporters claim that his arrest and imprisonment were politically motivated, intended to silence his criticism of Putin.
The trial ended in June and took place behind closed doors at the IK-6 penal colony at Melekhovo, around 155 miles east of Moscow, where Navalny is being held.
Friday’s verdict extends Navalny’s time in prison and raise further concerns about the brutal crackdown on Putin’s opponents that has been accelerated since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The European Union was quick to condemn the sentence, saying it reiterated its “deep concern about reports of repeated ill-treatment, unjustified and unlawful disciplinary measures, and harassment amounting to physical and psychological torture by prison authorities against Mr Navalny.”
Navalny has been incarcerated in Russia since his return to the country in January 2021, on charges of violating terms of probation related to a years-old fraud case, which he dismisses as politically motivated.
There have been concerns about his wellbeing: Navalny lost weight and suffered stomach pain earlier this year, leading to fears among his lawyers that he had again been poisoned.
He had previously been taken from Russia to Germany in August 2020, after he was poisoned with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok. Navalny arrived comatose at a hospital in Berlin, following a medical evacuation flight from the Siberian city of Omsk.
Navalny has been imprisoned since his return to Russia in 2021. – Reuters
A joint investigation by CNN and the group Bellingcat implicated the Russian Security Service (FSB) in Navalny’s poisoning, piecing together how an elite unit at the agency had followed Navalny’s team throughout a trip to Siberia, when he fell ill.
The investigation also found that this unit, which included chemical weapons experts, had followed Navalny on more than 30 trips to and from Moscow since 2017.
Russia denies involvement in Navalny’s poisoning. Putin himself said in December 2020 that if Russian security services had wanted to kill Navalny, they “would have finished” the job.
Although the Russian authorities’ targeting of Navalny pre-dates Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the country has cracked down even more dramatically on internal opposition and free speech since launching the war.
An expanded and intentionally vague law on “foreign agents” came into effect late last year, requiring organizations and individuals engaging in political activity and receiving funding from abroad to adhere to draconian rules and restrictions.
Russia has also restricted access to Facebook, many Western news sites, and independent media in the country. Peaceful protests were quickly shut down and thousands arrested after Moscow’s invasion.
And the government has adopted a law criminalizing the dissemination of what it called “deliberately false” information about the Russian armed forces, with a maximum penalty is 15 years in prison.
Navalny has nonetheless been a vocal critic of the conflict. On the anniversary of the invasion in February, he called it “an unjust war of aggression against Ukraine under ridiculous pretexts.”
CNN’s Niamh Kennedy, Christian Edwards and Radina Gigova contributed reporting
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Jailed Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny had an extra 19 years added to his jail term on Friday in a criminal case which he and his supporters said was trumped up to keep him behind bars and out of politics for even longer.
Navalny, 47, President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest domestic critic, is already serving sentences totalling 11-1/2 years on fraud and other charges that he says are also bogus. His political movement has been outlawed and declared “extremist”.
A court at the IK-6 penal colony in Melekhovo, about 145 miles east of Moscow where he is serving his sentences, was trying him on Friday on six separate criminal charges, including inciting and financing extremist activity and creating an extremist organisation.
The audio feed from the court was so poor that it was practically impossible to make out what the judge was saying.
Navalny’s team said the judge had added 19 years to his sentences as a result of the new charges. State prosecutors had asked the court to hand him another 20 years in a penal colony.
Dressed in his dark prison uniform and flanked by his lawyers, Navalny smiled at times as he listened to the judge.
In a message posted on social media a day earlier Navalny had predicted he would get a long jail term, but had said it didn’t really matter because he was also threatened with separate terrorism charges that could bring another decade.
Navalny had said the purpose of giving him extra jail time was to frighten Russians, but had urged them not to let that happen and to think hard about how best to resist what he called the “villains and thieves in the Kremlin.”
The charges relate to his role in his now defunct movement inside Russia, which the authorities said had been trying to foment a revolution by seeking to destabilise the socio-political situation.
