Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny has been sentenced to nine years in a maximum-security jail after being found guilty of fraud charges over allegations that he stole from his Anti-Corruption Foundation.
He’s currently serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence in a detention center near Moscow after he was arrested in February 2021 for violating his probation. Navalny has said publicly that this verdict was politically violated.
Moscow’s Lefortovo court has now convicted Navalny of the fraud charges and handed him an additional nine years in prison.
After the sentence was announced, Navalny tweeted that he had been given nine years, and quoted a line from the TV show The Wire about prison sentences. He also said he was grateful to people for their support, and that the best support that can be provided for him and fellow political prisoners is action, not words.
Navalny is expected to appeal the guilty verdict, according to his lawyer.
Russian state-owned news agency RIA said that Navalny was also fined 1.2 million rubles in the sentencing.
Navalny is a known critic of the Kremlin. He was first detained last year in February after he arrived in Moscow from Berlin, where he had been for several months while recovering from being poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok. He blamed the nerve agent attack on Russian security services and directly on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Russia added Navalny and his top associates and aides to the “extremist and terrorist” federal registry list in January. His Anti-Corruption Foundation was also banned by the courts last year as an “extremist” group.
From prison, he denounced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by posting on social media. He advocated for protests against the war and said that anti-war protests are the backbone of the movement against war and death.
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