Alexei Navalny has appeared in a Moscow court for the second time this week, this time on a charge of defaming a second world war veteran.
The Russian opposition leader, who was ordered earlier this week to serve two years and eight months in prison, criticised the latest hearing as a “disgusting PR trial” intended by the Kremlin to disparage him.
Last June, Russia’s investigative committee launched an investigation into Navalny on charges of defamation, after the politician called people featured in a video promoting the constitutional reform that allowed an extension to President Vladimir Putin’s rule “corrupt stooges” “people without conscience” and “traitors”.
The authorities maintained that Navalny’s comments “denigrate (the) honour and dignity” of a war veteran featured in the video. If convicted, Navalny faces a fine or community service.
“This trial was conceived as some kind of PR trial, because the Kremlin needs headlines, ‘Navalny slandered a veteran’,” the politician said in the courtroom Friday.
Profile Who is Alexei Navalny?
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Born in 1976 just outside Moscow, Alexei Navalny is a lawyer-turned-campaigner whose Anti-Corruption Foundation investigates the wealth of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
He started out as a Russian nationalist, but emerged as the main leader of Russia’s democratic opposition during the wave of protests that led up to the 2012 presidential election, and has since been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side.
Navalny is barred from appearing on state television, but has used social media to his advantage. A 2017 documentary accusing the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, of corruption received more than 30m views on YouTube within two months.
He has been repeatedly arrested and jailed. The European court of human rights ruled that Russia violated Navalny’s rights by holding him under house arrest in 2014. Election officials barred him from running for president in 2018 due to an embezzlement conviction that he claims was politically motivated. Navalny told the commission its decision would be a vote ‘not against me, but against 16,000 people who have nominated me; against 200,000 volunteers who have been canvassing for me’.
There has also been a physical price to pay. In April 2017, he was attacked with green dye that nearly blinded him in one eye, and in July 2019 he was taken from jail to hospital with symptoms that one of his doctors said could indicate poisoning. In 2020, he was again hospitalised after a suspected poisoning, and taken to Germany for treatment. The German government later said toxicology results showed Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent.
Navalny was sent to prison again in February 2021, sentenced to two years and eight months, in a move that triggered marches in Moscow and the arrest of more than 1,000 protesters
Photograph: Pavel Golovkin/AP
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Last month, the 44-year-old Navalny, an anti-corruption investigator and Putin’s most prominent critic, was arrested upon returning from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nerve-agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin. Russian authorities rejected the accusations.
A Moscow court on Tuesday found Navalny violated the probation terms of his suspended sentence from a 2014 money-laundering conviction, and ordered him to serve two years and eight months in prison.
The politician’s arrest and jailing triggered massive protests across Russia, in which tens of thousands took to the streets to demand his release. Many protesters also chanted slogans against Putin in the largest show of discontent in years. Thousands of protesters have been detained.
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