Russia hands jail sentences to three Alexey Navalny lawyers

Lawyers face up to five years in jail on charges of links to Navalny’s groups, which the Kremlin deems ‘extremist’.

A Russian court has sentenced three lawyers who had defended the late opposition leader Alexey Navalny to several years in prison.

Friday’s sentences come as Russia, amid a massive crackdown during its war on Ukraine, seeks to punish Navalny’s associates since his unexplained death in an Arctic prison colony in February 2024.

Igor Sergunin, Alexei Liptser and Vadim Kobzev were handed sentences ranging from three and a half years to five years by a court in the town of Petushki, about 100km (60 miles) east of Moscow for bringing messages from the late opposition leader from prison to the outside world.

The independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported that Kobzev said in his final statement in court on January 10 that “we are being tried for transmitting Navalny’s thoughts to other people”.

They were arrested in October 2023 on charges of involvement with “extremist” groups, as Navalny’s networks were deemed by authorities.

The case was widely seen as a way to increase pressure on the opposition to discourage defence lawyers from taking political cases.

At the time, Navalny was serving a 19-year prison term on several criminal convictions, including extremism, which he has vehemently denied.

Navalny’s networks were deemed extremist following a 2021 ruling that outlawed his organisations – the Anti-Corruption Foundation and a network of regional offices – as extremist groups.

That ruling, which exposed anyone involved with the organisations to prosecution, was condemned by Kremlin critics as politically motivated and designed to stifle Navalny’s activities.

According to Navalny’s allies, authorities accused the lawyers of using their position to pass information from him to his team.

Navalny, an anticorruption campaigner and outspoken opponent of President Vladimir Putin, was arrested in 2021 upon his return from Germany, where he was recuperating from a nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin.

In December 2023, Navalny was moved from a penal colony in the Vladimir region east of Moscow to one above the Arctic Circle, where he died the following February at the age of 47 under still-unexplained circumstances.

On Friday, his widow issued a statement calling for the three lawyers to be freed “immediately”, describing them as “political prisoners”.

Two other lawyers, Olga Mikhailova and Alexander Fedulov, are on a wanted list but no longer live in Russia.