MOSCOW: Russia’s state prosecutors have requested a 20-year prison sentence for jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny on charges including “extremism”, according to state news agency TASS.
The verdict will be announced on August 4, TASS cited a lawyer as saying.
Navalny condemned Russia’s war in Ukraine during Thursday’s closed-door court hearing, according to a statement released by his aides.
“[Russia is] floundering in a pool of either mud or blood, with broken bones, with a poor and robbed population, and around it lie tens of thousands of people killed in the most stupid and senseless war of the 21st century,” he said. Navalny is already serving an 11.5-year prison sentence over fraud and other charges, in a maximum security penal colony in Melekhovo, 250 kilometres (150 miles) east of Moscow.
President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent and vocal opponent faces a grab-bag of new charges, which he says are similarly fabricated to keep him out of political life.
Court records showed they related to six different articles of the Russian criminal code, including inciting and financing extremist activity and creating an extremist organisation.
The latest request by prosecutors against the Kremlin’s biggest rival could see 47-year-old Navalny remain behind bars for at least 20 more years. Navalny, who exposed official corruption and organised significant anti-Kremlin protests, was arrested in January 2021 upon returning to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. He said that prosecutors had provided him with 3,828 pages describing all the crimes he is alleged to have committed while in prison. –Agencies
