A Russian court convicted imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny on charges of extremism on Friday. The court sentenced him to 19 years in prison. Navalny is already serving a nine-year term on a variety of charges. The outspoken critic of Russia’s government says those charges were politically motivated.
It was Navalny’s fifth criminal conviction and the third and longest prison term handed to him.
His supporters consider the Kremlin’s legal pursuit of Navalny to be a form of persecution: a deliberate strategy to silence the government’s most ardent opponent.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether the imprisoned activist would serve this new term concurrently with or sequentially after his current sentence. He is presently held on charges of fraud and contempt of court.
The prosecution had demanded a 20-year prison sentence. The politician himself said beforehand that he expected to receive a lengthy term. The extremism trial took place behind closed doors in the penal colony east of Moscow where he is imprisoned.
Navalny appeared in the courtroom Friday afternoon. He wore prison garb and looked gaunt, but he had a defiant smile on his face. As the judge read the verdict, the politician stood alongside his lawyers, listening with a serious expression.
It took the judge less than 10 minutes to announce the verdict and the sentence—something that in Russia usually takes hours or even days.
The 47-year-old Navalny is President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe. He has exposed official corruption and organized major anti-Kremlin protests. Navalny was arrested in January 2021. He had just returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning. He blames the poisoning on the Kremlin.
Navalny rejected all the charges against him as politically motivated. He accused the Kremlin of seeking to keep him behind bars for life. By law, Navalny has 10 days to appeal the verdict. If he does, it will not take effect until the appeal is officially decided.
The night before the verdict hearing, Navalny released a statement on social media, presumably through his team. 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. He 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.”
Whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin. — James 4:17
