Russian authorities have detained three lawyers for Alexei Navalny after raiding their homes on extremism charges, a move allies of the jailed opposition leader say is meant to further isolate him from the outside world.
Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin and Alexey Liptser are being charged with being part of an extremist group, which carries a sentence of up to six years in prison, Mr Navalny’s team said on Friday.
The charges come as Mr Navalny (47) is set to be transferred to a “special regime” prison colony after being sentenced in August to 19 years for extremism, on top of the 11½ years he was already serving on a separate conviction.
“This is an act of intimidation with a clear intention to strengthen Navalny’s isolation from the outer world,” Mr Navalny’s chief of staff Leonid Volkov wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “His lawyers will not be able to visit him there, or even to find out his whereabouts if they’re locked up themselves. Terrifying.”
A charismatic anti-corruption activist who cultivated an online following to present the greatest challenge to president Vladimir Putin’s rule, Mr Navalny was arrested when he returned to Russia from Germany in 2021 after recovering from a nerve agent poisoning.
Mr Putin has denied Mr Navalny’s allegations that he gave the order to kill him, but has admitted a hit squad of officers from the FSB, Russia’s main security service, were shadowing him when he was poisoned in Siberia in 2020.
The president refuses to say Mr Navalny’s name in public and has repeatedly accused him, without citing evidence, of working on behalf of the US to destroy Russia.
Following Mr Navalny’s arrest, Russia crushed his foundation, arresting a handful of his supporters and prompting most of the rest to flee the country. His team currently works mostly from Lithuania.
Mr Navalny has described the prison conditions he is subject to as torture. Still, he has kept up a stream of messages to supporters passed through his lawyers and regularly denounced Mr Putin and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at court hearings.
“This perfectly characterises not just my trial, but the state of the rule of law in Russia,” Mr Navalny said at a hearing Friday in the penal colony more than 200km east of Moscow where he is currently held. According to an audio recording posted by his supporters, he went on to compare the Putin regime to Soviet-era repression.
“Like in the Soviet times, they’re not just going after political activists and turning them into political prisoners, but they’re going after their lawyers as well.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023