Imprisoned opponent Alexei Navalny vowed on Tuesday to continue his fight against the Kremlin, on the first day of a new trial where he faces ten additional years in prison.
Last year, the movement of President Vladimir Putin’s top critic was crushed by Russian authorities, who ordered it banned and launched multiple lawsuits against its executives.
Alexei Navalny, who survived a serious poisoning in 2020, appeared in a courtroom of his penal colony a hundred kilometers from Moscow, dressed as a convict and shaved hair, still very thin, alongside his lawyers and of several guards.
“I say this to those who are against the looting of Russia, to those who do not like United Russia (the party of Vladimir Putin),” he told the court. “I will continue to fight. During a break at the start of the hearing, the 45-year-old opponent took his wife Yulia Navalnaïa in his arms and kissed her several times, smiling, noted a journalist.
The imprisonment of Alexeï Navalny has been strongly criticized by Western countries and this new trial risks rekindling tensions. “His conviction is incompatible with the principles of the rule of law,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz denounced on Tuesday during a trip to Moscow.
Trial from prison
The head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken said he was “worried” about the new charges against the Russian opponent and called, in a tweet, for his “release” and the end of the prosecution against him.
For more than a year, Alexei Navalny has been serving a sentence for a controversial “fraud” case, in penal colony No. 2 in Pokrov, 100 km east of Moscow.
It is from this prison that his trial is held, which opened on Tuesday, a situation denounced by the opponent and his supporters, judging that it is a means of limiting the publicity of the debates. “I have not yet been found guilty, but I am presented in prisoner’s uniform (…) It is so that the grandmother who watches TV thinks that (I) am already in prison anyway”, a- he protested.
VIDEO. Pro-Navalny demonstrations: more than 4,000 arrests across Russia in January 2021
In this trial, investigators accuse Alexei Navalny of embezzling more than 356 million rubles (4.1 million euros) in donations to his anti-corruption organizations, charges that carry a 10-year prison sentence .
“I have the right to investigate how our money is stolen!” “, he thundered, believing that there was no proof that he stole “a single penny”.
The activist also faces up to six months in prison for contempt of court at one of his previous hearings. The two cases are tried in the same trial.
His lawyers requested on Tuesday that he be dressed in civilian clothes and that the hearing be adjourned and transferred to a Moscow court, requests denied by Judge Margarita Kotova. His wife and infallible supporter, Yulia Navalnaïa, protested Monday against the “cowardice” of the Kremlin, describing the new prosecutions against her husband as “illegal”.
In 2020, Alexei Navalny spent several months recovering in Germany after narrowly surviving poisoning by a nerve agent, for which he holds Vladimir Putin responsible.
He was arrested in January 2021 on his return to his country and imprisoned in a “fraud” case dating from 2014. A conviction which provoked new Western sanctions against Moscow.
” I am not afraid “
At the end of January, Alexei Navalny was placed on the list of “terrorists and extremists”. He is also the subject of prosecution for “creating an extremist organization”, a crime also punishable by 10 years in prison. One of the prosecutors reaffirmed on Tuesday that the opponent had carried out “extremist activities under the pretext of fighting corruption”.
With his usual irony, Navalny had told his supporters in September not to worry because he would be “free no later than the spring of 2051.” “You will increase my sentence indefinitely,” he told his judges. Tuesday. “But what can we do about it? What people do is more important than one person’s fate. I am not afraid. »