Putin critic Alexei Navalny loses appeal against prison camp sentence

Alexei Navalny told the court he has no regrets about coming back to Russia to a sure imprisonment

Credit: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

Mr Navalny blamed President Vladimir Putin personally for the attack on his life and embarrassed his intelligence agencies by taking part in an independent investigation that identified FSB agents who trailed him for days before the poisoning.

Russian took to the streets for two straight weekends to protest Mr Navalny’s incarceration, which has led to a record 11,000 detentions across the country.

Mr Navalny, who trained as a lawyer, has exposed official corruption for over a decade and spear-headed several waves of major opposition protests. 

As he campaigned for president ahead of the 2017, Mr Navalny built a sprawling network of supporters across the country, setting up offices across the country where his allies have become a political force to be reckoned with.

Mr Navalny’s supporters last autumn dented the majority of the pro-Kremlin party by winning council seats in two Siberian cities where Mr Navalny campaigned before he was poisoned.

After he was jailed to three years for violating the terms of his suspended sentence earlier this month, Mr Navalny also faced the court on charges of slandering a Second World War veteran.

The defamation charges cannot add any more jail time to his sentence but they have provided plenty of fodder for state television which had a field day last week, portraying Mr Navalny as a Nazi sympathiser who tramples on the memory of the Soviet Union’s victory in the war.

The ruling in the defamation case is expected later today, after which Mr Navalny is likely to be shipped off to a remote prison colony, cutting him off from his family and lawyers for several weeks.