Was it worth your effort?

Judge of the Leninsky Court of Kirov Sergei Blinov began reading the verdict in the case of Alexei Navalny and Pyotr Ofitserov, accused of theft by embezzlement, which resulted in damage to the Kirovles company. From the first lines it is clear that the accused have been found guilty. The punishment will be announced at the very end. According to various sources, the verdict ranges from 100 to 160 pages.

Navalny arrived in Kirov early in the morning of July 18, with him a large support group, including Duma deputies from A Just Russia Dmitry Gudkov and Ilya Ponomarev, members of the Opposition Coordination Council Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Tor (Gudkov is also a member of the Constitutional Court), journalist Olga Romanova ( former member of the Constitutional Court).

Navalny has already managed to write on Twitter that the judge is simply reading the indictment.

The court found Navalny to be the organizer of the theft of timber belonging to the Kirovles company, and Ofitserov to be his accomplice. The court considered the testimony of the former general director of Kirovles, Vyacheslav Opalev, who received a four-year suspended sentence under the same article, to be reliable. Navalny, on the contrary, accuses Opalev of lying. But the court sees no reason to consider them false, nor to consider the persecution political. The court also considered the testimony of other prosecution witnesses reliable and proving the guilt of Navalny and Ofitserov, although many of them generally admitted in court that they did not remember the circumstances of the case. As for the defense witnesses, “they were misled due to ignorance of the situation.”

And the verdict itself - both defendants were given real sentences, Ofitserov four years, Navalny five years in a correctional colony. No conditional ones. Both will be arrested in the courtroom. In addition, both must pay a fine of 500 thousand rubles.

The lawyers intend to appeal to the cassation court. Until the decision of the higher court, Navalny and Officers will be kept in a pre-trial detention center in Kirov.

Navalny and Ofitserov were taken away; it is unknown which pre-trial detention center. People went to pre-trial detention center No. 1, then to pre-trial detention center No. 2, the police began to detain the participants in the procession. In particular, one of the leaders of Navalny’s support headquarters in Kirov, Nikolai Lyaskin, was detained. Navalny's supporters staged a sit-in outside the pre-trial detention center.

An unexpected development of events: a representative of the prosecutor's office filed an appeal against the arrest of Navalny and Ofitserov in the courtroom. The prosecution believes that the decision to arrest was illegal, since the sentence has not yet entered into force. However, lately our prosecutor’s office often turns out to be more lenient and more legal than the court (do not forget, however, that the prosecution wanted to give the accused a year more than the court gave them). A meeting to consider the appeal of the prosecutor's office is scheduled for July 19 at 10.00.

Meanwhile, in Moscow on Manezhnaya Square, where people can come at 19.00 to discuss Navalny’s verdict, urgent repair work suddenly began. The area is closed.

Later, however, it became known that the work was also suddenly stopped and the fences were removed. Apparently, they didn’t want any trouble in the presence of the finance ministers of the G20 member countries. However, new fences have appeared along Manezhnaya Square and on the side of Mokhovaya Street.

The head of Navalny’s campaign headquarters, Leonid Volkov, quoted by Novaya Gazeta, believes that “imprisonment is a huge drop in ratings. Under these conditions, crawling to the elections is absolutely pointless. What will happen now has nothing to do with the elections. All we have to do is try to disrupt and interfere with this illegal procedure. The headquarters does not stop working, but it will turn into a boycott headquarters.”