A Russian court has jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny for a further 19 years on charges of “extremism”.
He will serve the term in a “special regime” colony for men serving life sentences and “particularly dangerous recidivists”, Moscow City Court ruled. Such detention centres have the strictest conditions in the Russian penal system and are located in remote corners of the country.
Prosecutors had asked for a 20-year prison sentence on half-a-dozen charges, including creating an “extremist community” — Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation and his nationwide network of political activists — and bringing back Nazism.
The closed-door hearing took place in a maximum-security penal colony in the settlement of Melekhovo, located east of Moscow, where Navalny was already serving a nine-year sentence for fraud and other offences.
Navalny’s parents and journalists were not allowed into the courtroom and had to rely on a video transmission.
Ahead of his sentencing on Friday, Navalny released an extended statement, urging supporters to respond to the verdict “coldbloodedly”.
“Please do not show solidarity with me with wails and cries . . . It is better to show solidarity with me and other political prisoners by thinking for a minute. Think about why such a . . . huge term is necessary. Its main purpose is to intimidate,” he said in the statement, which was posted on his website by allies.
The US state department condemned the verdict on Friday. In a statement it called for Navalny’s immediate release and “an end to the continued repression of independent voices in Russia”.
Daniel Cholodny, a former technical director of Navalny’s YouTube channel, was jailed for eight years in the same case. Prosecutors had requested a 10-year sentence.
A lawyer who made his name as an anti-corruption blogger in the early 2010s, over the past decade Navalny has become the figurehead of the Russian opposition movement and a leading target for the Russian authorities.
In 2020, he was poisoned and nearly killed by a Soviet-era nerve agent, only recovering after being transported to Germany for months-long medical treatment. He chose to return to Russia in January 2021, only to be detained by the authorities shortly afterwards.
In February 2021 he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison after a court amended a suspended sentence handed to him in 2014 for defrauding a Russian subsidiary of Yves Rocher.
In 2022, he received an additional nine-year sentence for embezzling donations for his Anti-corruption Foundation, which is designated as extremist in Russia alongside Isis and al-Qaeda, and for contempt of court.
Navalny insisted that all the charges were false and politically motivated.
In April, Navalny announced that the authorities had initiated another case against him on “terrorism” charges that would be heard by a military court, although no date has yet been set.
In his pre-sentencing statement, Navalny said it was noteworthy that Russian “propaganda” was silent on the lengthy term requested by prosecutors, suggesting the authorities knew that such a long sentence could build sympathy for him among ordinary Russians.
“Please consider and realise that by jailing hundreds, Putin is trying to intimidate millions,” he said.
He urged supporters to find ways, large or small, to continue to push back against the Kremlin.
“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,” Navalny said.