The crime of letters. Russian court upholds prison terms for Navalny’s former lawyers

Vladimir Regional Court has refused prosecutors’ bid to stiffen the jail terms of three lawyers who once defended Alexei Navalny, leaving intact sentences handed down in January. Vadim Kobzev, Alexei Liptser and Igor Sergunin were found guilty of “participation in an extremist community” in relation to Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK in Russian) and given sentences of five and a half, five, and three and a half years respectively. Prosecutors had asked the court to add a few months to each term, arguing the original punishments were too lenient, but judges declined to do so. The groundbreaking case against the lawyers revolves around the fact that the lawyers passed Navalny’s letters from prison to his supporters, thereby allowing him “to continue to perform the functions of leader and head of an extremist community”.

Three of Alexei Navalny’s lawyers, Vadim Kobzev, Alexei Liptser and Igor Sergunin, were arrested on October 13, 2023, a few months before the opposition leader’s murder in prison, accused of “participating in an extremist community”. Investigators alleged that the lawyers “used their status” to regularly pass letters from the opposition leader to his associates, allowing Navalny to “continue to carry out the functions of a leader and head of an extremist community” from behind bars.

Sergunin had pleaded guilty Then, the lawyers were moved from Moscow to Vladimir region where Navalny’s first prison after his return to Russia in January 2021 was located.

In January 2025, Vadim Kobzev (now 42) was sentenced to five and a half years in a penal colony, Alexei Liptser (now 38) to five years, and Igor Sergunin (now 46) to three and a half years.

The prosecution had asked the court to add a few months to each term, arguing the original punishments were too lenient. They also asked judges to strip away mitigating factors cited at the original sentencing for Kobzev and Liptser, specifically the court’s finding about their family’s difficult financial circumstances.

During trial, Liptser’s lawyer Anna Stavitskaya slammed the original verdict as a near-verbatim copy of the prosecution’s indictment: out of 230 pages of the verdict, 215 repeat the indictment word-for-word. Liptser noted that the “extremist community” verdict against him was shoddily fabricated and contained numerous disqualifying errors. His defence also noted his severely deteorating health.

Earlier this month, a judge has refused to grant Alexei Liptser temporary release to attend the funeral of his mother, Elena Liptser, Novaya Gazeta reported.

“The judge determined that, as the verdict in the ‘extremism’ case against Alexei Liptser had not yet entered into force, he did not have the right in ‘exceptional circumstances’ to be transferred outside the pre-trial detention centre,” the newspaper wrote.

The decision stands in contrast to the case of theatre director Zhenya Berkovich, who, while still awaiting trial in November 2023, was permitted to attend her grandmother’s funeral. Berkovich’s transfer from Moscow to St Petersburg was officially arranged under the pretext of an investigative action. Upon arrival, she was allowed to be present at the funeral for 10 minutes, in handcuffs and under guard. Berkovich later said that the people who had made it possible for her to say goodbye to her grandmother had “committed an act of mercy”.

Elena Liptser, a prominent Moscow lawyer, was the daughter of the veteran civil rights activist Lev Ponomarev, leader of “For Human Rights” movement. Ponomarev was forced to leave Russia in 2022 after a campaign of harrassment. She died on September 5 after a long illness aged 58.

Andrei Grivtsov, defending Kobzev, argued that the very foundation of legal defence was at stake. “If you say that this is possible, then the legal profession will end,” he told the court. “It will be impossible to defend people. They will not trust you.”

In his final remarks, Vadim Kobzev announced that he would speak to two imaginary interlocutors: Josef Švejk, the hapless soldier from Jaroslav Hašek’s satirical novel, and an unseen moderator from an “ontological battle” in Honoré de Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. He joked that the judges should forgive his literary excesses, explaining that during months of detention he had read more than 200 books, often for eight hours a day.

“Like Hašek’s hero [Švejk], I am accused of preparing an uprising,” he said. “The chain of synonyms is easy to continue: revolution, coup d’état, rebellion, mutiny, conspiracy. In pre-revolutionary criminal law it was called ‘an attempt to overthrow the existing system’, or ‘an encroachment on the form of government’, while in Soviet jurisprudence it was ‘anti-Soviet conspiratorial activity’. My charge is as old as the world.”

He stressed that the key word of their case was “letters”. “It appears in the verdict hundreds of times. The letters of Alexei Navalny. I listened to them from the author himself, I took them from his hands, I wrote them down in my own hand, I discussed them with him, I retold them to other people. So it is written in the verdict.” Among the letters for which he was convicted, he said, was Navalny’s . “The court decided that with this interview Navalny was overthrowing power in Russia.”

Kobzev reminded the court that others had once stood accused of the same offence, including Fyodor Dostoevsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He noted that Solzhenitsyn had even been later received in person by Vladimir Putin, and that a school in the Vladimir region now bears his name. He added: “Under [Emperor] Nicholas I you could get four years for letters, under Stalin eight. I was given something in between. You must now decide how many years letters earn under Putin.”

He mentioned that their case is “a trifle, a private tragedy of three Moscow families”; however, he sought to address those beyond the courtroom: “And to you, respected listeners and readers of my words, I say: see you in 2028.”

The case against Navalny’s lawyers heavily relied on secret surveillance of their meetings with the imprisoned politician, despite Russian law prohibiting eavesdropping on lawyer-client conversations, as reported by the BBC Russian service.

The surveillance began in August 2021, just two days after Navalny’s ACF was outlawed as extremist. A court in Vladimir had already authorised video and audio recording of all Navalny’s short visits months earlier. Officials justified the spying by citing “operational information” that Navalny allegedly “intended to bribe” prison staff.

For two years, cameras and microphones monitored his lawyers, including Kobzev, Liptser and Sergunin. Another lawyer, Olga Mikhailova, who managed to leave the country before the arrest, described “a cool camera, mounted in the ceiling.”

According to the verdict, the lawyers “covered written notes with their hands” and used “special codes”—like referring to Navalny’s closest aide Leonid Volkov as “LV”.

The three-judge panel rejected the prosecution’s appeal but upheld the original prison terms, making only minor amendments to post-release restrictions.

According to their defence teams, all three men are now formally eligible for parole. However, standard practice by the FSIN, the prison service, means they are unlikely to be considered for at least six months. For Igor Sergunin, this means he will almost certainly serve his full sentence.