Alexey Navalny given additional 19-year jail term for founding ‘extremist community’

The state prosecution wanted 20 years behind bars for the politician

A Moscow court has sentenced jailed opposition politician Alexey Navalny to 19 further years in prison after finding him guilty of establishing an “extremist community”.

UPDATE
Navalny has confirmed he has received 19 years in prison on extremism-related charges.

Navalny, who founded the non-profit Anti-Corruption Foundation in 2011, was tried for extremism alongside the former technical director of his Navalny LIVE YouTube channel, Daniel Kholodny. He was sentenced to eight years in prison. The state prosecutor asked the court to sentence the men to 20 and 10 years in jail respectively for financing and “participating in an extremist community”.

The prison administration promised the politician’s parents, Lyudmila and Anatoly, that they would be allowed inside the courtroom when their son’s verdict was delivered. However, they were taken to a separate room to watch the broadcast, they told Mediazona.

Due to Navalny already being in jail, the case was heard in the Vladimir region prison where he is currently incarcerated. The Anti-Corruption Foundation’s former chairman Leonid Volkov noted that this is the first criminal case opened against Navalny for his political work.

The politician was indicted on six counts:

• calling for extremism

• creating a non-profit organisation that infringes on citizens’ rights

• financing extremism

• creating an “extremist community”

• involving minors in committing dangerous acts

• rehabilitation of Nazism

The financing extremism charges relate to donations made to the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a non-profit organisation created by Navalny in 2011, while the charge of “calling for extremism” related to tweets made by a former Anti-Corruption Foundation cameraman.

Prosecutors justified adding the charges relating to minors by pointing to people under 18 attending protests organised by the Anti-Corruption Foundation. The “rehabilitation of Nazism” charge relates to an artwork created by Navalny’s Volgograd headquarters as a reaction to Navalny being attacked with antiseptic green dye in 2017. The artwork depicted Volgograd’s iconic WWII monument, The Motherland Calls, being drowned in green dye.

The defence team called former Yekaterinburg Mayor Yevgeny Roizman, Editor-in-Chief of Novaya Gazeta Dmitry Muratov, and jailed politicians Ilya Yashin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and Lilia Chanysheva as witnesses.

Ahead of the sentencing, Navalny expressed his gratitude to his supporters in a tweet on Thursday, urging them to show their solidarity with political prisoners and to find ways to oppose “Putin’s regime”.

“There is no shame in choosing the safest way to resist. There is shame in doing nothing. It’s shameful to let yourself be intimidated,” he added.

In his closing statement to the court in July, Navalny argued that “a country without justice will never thrive” and admitted that he had not been expecting a fair trial: “When I stand here and look at this court, my conscience tells me that there’ll be no justice for me or anyone else.”

In March 2022, Navalny was found guilty of embezzlement and handed a nine-year jail sentence in a case that was widely seen to be politically motivated. Since then, he has also been given an additional sentence of three and a half years in a separate embezzlement case.

In mid-June, Navalny’s associate Lilia Chanysheva was sentenced to 7 years and 6 months behind bars. Chanysheva was the first person to be arrested in the extremism case launched against the Anti-Corruption Foundation.