Russian prosecutor compares Navalny to Nazi collaborator in defamation trial dismissed as sham

Alexei Navalny has been behind bars since his returned to Russia from Germany in mid-January

Credit: EPA-EFE/EPA-EFE

A Russian prosecutor portrayed Alexei Navalny as a Nazi sympathiser at the end of the defamation trial that the Kremlin critic has dismissed as a smear campaign against him.

The Russian opposition leader is already behind bars after being arrested upon return from Germany in January.

Mr Navalny, who nearly died from nerve agent poisoning before he was airlifted to Germany, was sentenced to nearly three years in prison earlier this month for violating the terms of his probation.

His return to Russia and the subsequent jailing have sparked the country’s biggest wave of protests in a decade with thousands of people rallying across Russia’s 11 time zones, and the European Union is mulling over potential sanctions against the Kremlin.

Mr Navalny, who is kept in Moscow’s notorious jail, is now standing trial for defaming a Second World War veteran over his disparaging remarks about a dozen people who spoke in a campaign video for Vladimir Putin’s constitutional amendments last summer.

Both linguistic experts invited to the court by the defence and the prosecution told the court last week that Mr Navalny’s remarks calling the speakers in the video “lackeys and traitors” can be regarded as insulting but not slanderous.

The defamation charges cannot add any more jail time to Mr Navalny’s prison sentence but the ongoing trial has been seen as the perfect fodder for state television to vilify the opposition leader in the eyes of ordinary Russians.

Yekaterina Frolova, the lead prosecutor, in cross examination at a Moscow court on Tuesday went further than the actual charges, seeking to portray Mr Navalny as a Nazi sympathizer.

She spoke of Mr Navalny’s nationalist leanings in his youth and referred to recent cases of violence against veterans as allegedly perpetrated by Mr Navalny’s supporters.

“His intention was not only to insult but to deliberately spread anti-patriotic ideology and foster hatred between generations,” she told the court on Tuesday.

The prosecutor compared the jailed politician to Gen. Andrey Vlasov, Russia’s best-known Nazi collaborator, saying that Mr Navalny’s remarks were “part of a campaign to destroy the truth about our history and victory in the war.”

The trial offered Russian state TV a field day to dismiss Mr Navalny as a Nazi sympathiser.

Vladimir Solovyev, described as one of Russia’s best propagandists, in his afternoon talk show on Tuesday devoted to the Navalny trial said that “Hitler was a brave person: he never dodged the army draft like Navalny.”

Mr Navalny, who joked with his lawyers and asked them about his children before the hearing, told the court that the defamation case is the most absurd of all criminal charges he faced in the past.

Unlike his attorney, Mr Navalny, a lawyer by training, refused to go into legal details of the case and instead joked about receiving parcels of cucumbers and salt in his cell.

“Every second of this trial makes no sense from the legal point of view,” he said from the glass cage that he was kept in.

“Your Honour, do you by any chance know a good recipe for pickled cucumbers since it makes no sense talking legal matters to you.”

The hearings were adjourned until Saturday when Mr Navalny is expected in court both for the verdict in the defamation case as well as an appeal of his three-year jailing.