Alexei Navalny was sentenced in March to nine years in prison for “fraud” and “contempt of court”.
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Imprisoned Russian opponent Alexei Navalny said on Thursday (October 20th) he was facing new criminal charges for “promoting terrorism”, “calling for extremism”, “financing extremist activities” and “rehabilitating Nazism”, punishable by a total of 30 years in prison. “The lawyers calculated that it was about 30 years, taking into account the sentences provided for each of these articles” of the Penal Code, he said in a message broadcast by his team on social networks.
The 46-year-old anti-corruption activist, considered President Vladimir Putin’s main critic, says he received a notification informing him of the opening of this new criminal case when he is already imprisoned. “I am a genius in the criminal world (…) You all thought that I had been in solitary confinement for two years, in prison, but in fact I was actively committing crimes”he quipped, congratulating the Russian investigators for their “vigilance”.
According to him, these new accusations are visibly linked, in part, to videos published by his allies in exile, who continue to campaign against Russian power from abroad. Alexei Navalny was arrested in Russia in January 2021, on his return to the country after suffering a serious poisoning attempt, which he attributes to the Kremlin.
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Last March, he was sentenced to nine years in prison under a “severe” regime for charges of “fraud” which he considers fictitious. He continues to send messages denouncing Vladimir Putin and his intervention in Ukraine to his lawyers, which are then published online by his team. This summer, he repeatedly claimed to have been placed in a punishment cell in his penal colony near Vladimir, 200 km east of Moscow.