By Mark Trevelyan
LONDON (Reuters) – Russian prosecutors have demanded prison terms of nearly six years each for three lawyers who represented Alexei Navalny, an ally of the late opposition leader said on Tuesday.
Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin and Alexei Liptser are accused of taking part in an extremist organisation. They were arrested in October 2023 and added the following month to an official list of “terrorists and extremists”.
Navalny, who died suddenly in an Arctic penal colony in February, was himself convicted of extremism and other charges, all of which he denied. Prosecutors say the lawyers passed information to and from Navalny while he was in prison.
Navalny’s ally Ivan Zhdanov posted on the Telegram messaging app that prosecutors were seeking penal colony sentences of 5 years and 11 months for Kobzev, 5 years and 10 months for Liptser and five years and six months for Sergunin.
Navalny’s widow Yulia, in a YouTube video published last week, described the three accused men as political prisoners.
“They have not committed any crimes,” she said. “They are in prison for simply doing their job, which any lawyer should do with any prisoner: preparing a defence strategy, discussing issues of detention in prison, writing complaints, filing lawsuits.”
The lawyers’ trial has been conducted behind closed doors at the request of prosecutors, citing an unspecified security threat if it were held in public. The verdict is expected shortly.
The Kremlin says it does not comment on individual court cases, but authorities have cast Navalny and his supporters as Western-backed traitors seeking to destabilise Russia.
Yulia Navalnaya, who has taken up her husband’s mantle since his death, says they are fighting for a free, democratic Russia without President Vladimir Putin. She lives in foreign exile.
SECRET RECORDINGS
Human rights activists say the targeting of lawyers who defend people speaking out against the authorities and the war in Ukraine crosses a new threshold in the repression of dissent under Putin.
Despite his imprisonment, Navalny was able via his lawyers to post on social media and file frequent lawsuits over his treatment in prison, using the resulting legal hearings as a chance to keep speaking out against the government and the war.
Navalnaya’s YouTube video included secretly recorded meetings between Navalny and the accused lawyers in prison, something she said was illegal because an accused person has the right to confer privately with a lawyer.
Russia’s federal prison service did not reply to a request for comment.
Navalnaya said the recordings were made by the authorities but handed to Navalny’s team after they offered a reward for people to come forward with information about his death.
Navalnaya has accused Putin of having her husband killed, which the Kremlin denies. She has yet to present evidence.
In the video, she said she knew for certain that “the moment of Alexei’s murder” had been captured on multiple video cameras, and offered to pay 10 million roubles ($97,500) to anyone who would hand over the footage.
Navalny’s family was notified in August that there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding his death. A letter from an investigator said he had suffered from a “combination of diseases” and died as a result of a critical increase in blood pressure that had upset the rhythm of his heart.
Yulia Navalnaya said her husband, who was 47 when he died, had never had heart problems and rejected the official version as preposterous.
(Reporting by Mark Trevelyan; Editing by Gareth Jones)
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