Russian journalist and activist Olga Komleva sentenced to 12 years over ties to Navalny

A court in the Russian city of Ufa has sentenced local journalist Olga Komleva to 12 years in prison for spreading “false information” about the Russian military and participating in an “extremist organization” — namely, Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) — according to a report by the independent exiled outlet Mediazona. The trial was held behind closed doors, and many of the exact details regarding the charges remain unknown.

Komleva was sent to a pretrial detention facility in March last year. According to Mediazona, she is the mother of a 15-year-old son and suffers from type 2 diabetes. She previously worked with the outlet RusNews, covering protest movements in Bashkortostan — including the demonstrations in Baymak in January 2024.

Professionally trained as a land registry engineer, Komleva was a longtime volunteer at Navalny’s Ufa campaign office. In 2021, she was repeatedly detained and fined for attending pro-Navalny rallies. Later, Russia’s Interior Ministry and National Guard filed lawsuits against her, demanding 5.6 million rubles ($77,000 at the time) in “compensation” for police deployment at the protests. Her bank accounts, home, and car were seized as a result. Last August, she was added to Russia’s “List of Terrorists and Extremists,” which is maintained by the country’s financial monitoring agency Rosfinmonitoring.

Komleva is the latest member of the media to be handed a lengthy prison sentence for “participating” in the activities of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) — an organization founded by the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

The Russian Federal Penitentiary Service in the northern Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug reported Navalny’s death on Feb. 16, 2024, claiming he fell ill after a walk. The politician's family and associates are certain that he was murdered. The Russian authorities, however, have refused to investigate Navalny’s death, claiming that he died as a result of “arrhythmia” — an irregular heartbeat.

In late September 2024, The Insider released an investigation based on hundreds of official documents related to Navalny’s death. These indicated that the politician was poisoned while in prison. The documents showed that the Russian authorities consistently removed references to symptoms Navalny was noted by prison doctors to have been suffering — symptoms that did not fit with the Russian state’s official cause of death. As medical experts managed to confirm, these symptoms clearly indicate that Navalny was poisoned.

Many of Navalny’s supporters and associates — along with journalists who reported from his trials, doctors who called for an inquiry into his death, and even members of his legal team — have been persecuted and thrown in prison on charges of extremism. The purported Russian legal justification for these prosecutions stems from a 2021 ruling that designated Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) and its regional offices as “extremist organizations.”

The designation effectively criminalized any affiliation with the organization and gave Russian authorities permission to prosecute critics under the country’s expansive anti-extremism laws, tools widely criticized by international human rights groups as instruments of political repression. Russia’s Ministry of Justice refused to remove Navalny from its list of “terrorists and extremists” — even after his death.

The day after Navalny's murder, his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, gave an address in which she vowed to continue her late husband's work. Over 400 people were detained in dozens of cities across Russia at events in Navalny’s memory, and hundreds risked arrest to lay flowers and pay their respects at his funeral in Moscow on Mar. 1, 2024.

Since Navalny’s death, makeshift memorials dedicated to the politician have appeared all across the globe, maintained by communities of exiled activists.

Patriot, Alexei Navalny’s posthumous memoir, was released in multiple languages in mid-October last year.