A Russian court imprisons 3 lawyers for the late Russian leader Alexei Navalny

Three lawyers who represented the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny were jailed on Friday in Russia as part of a Kremlin crackdown on dissent that has reached levels not seen since Soviet times.

A court in the town of Petushki, about 100 kilometers east of Moscow, sentenced Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin and Alexei Liptzer to three and a half to five years in prison. They were arrested in October 2023 on charges of involvement with extremist groups, as Navalny’s networks were considered by the authorities.

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

At the time, Navalny was serving a 19-year prison sentence for several criminal convictions, including extremism. He died in a Russian concentration camp in February 2023.

The independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported that Kobzev said in his final statement before the court on January 10, “We are being tried on charges of transmitting Navalny’s ideas to other people.”

Navalny’s networks were deemed extremist after a 2021 ruling banned his organizations – the Anti-Corruption Foundation and a network of regional offices – as extremist groups.

The ruling, which exposes anyone involved in the organizations to prosecution, has been condemned by Kremlin critics as politically motivated and aimed at stifling Navalny’s activities.

According to Navalny’s allies, the authorities accused the lawyers of exploiting their positions to transfer information from him to his team.

He died in prison

Navalny, an anti-corruption activist and outspoken opponent of President Vladimir Putin, was arrested in 2021 upon his return from Germany, where he was recovering from a nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. He was ordered to spend two and a half years in prison.

After two more trials, his sentence was extended to 19 years. He and his allies said the charges were politically motivated and accused the Kremlin of seeking to imprison him for life.

In December 2023, Navalny was transferred from a penal colony in the Vladimir region east of Moscow to a colony above the Arctic Circle, where he died in February at the age of 47 in circumstances that remain unexplained. His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, and members of his team claimed that he was killed on orders from the Kremlin. Officials rejected this accusation.

Two other Navalny lawyers, Olga Mikhailova and Alexander Fidolov, are on the wanted list but no longer live in Russia. Mikhailova, who has defended Navalny for a decade, said she had been accused of extremism in absentia.

Kobzev, Liptzer and Sergunin are considered political prisoners, according to human rights defenders from the “Memorial” organization, the most prominent human rights group in Russia that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. The group demands their immediate release.