On Tuesday, Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny was sentenced to nine years in a maximum-security prison.
The prominent Kremlin critic was found guilty of fraud by Moscow’s Lefortovo court on allegations of stealing from his Anti-Corruption Foundation.
Navalny, 45, is currently serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence in a detention center east of Moscow after being arrested in February 2021 for violating probation terms, a verdict he claims was political in nature.
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After the sentence was announced on Tuesday, Navalny tweeted: “9 years. ‘You only do two days,’ as the characters in my favorite TV show, ‘The Wire,’ used to say. That’s the day you come in and the day you leave.'”
“I even had a T-shirt with this slogan,” he added, “but the prison authorities confiscated it because the print was extremist.
According to the Russian state-owned news agency RIA, Navalny, who was also fined 1.2 million rubles (approximately $11,500), will appeal the guilty verdict.
A visiting session of the Lefortovo court handed down the sentence on Tuesday at the Pokrov penal colony.
While Judge Margarita Kotova read out the charges against him, Navalny appeared unmoved, looking through some court documents on a table in front of him.
Following the trial, Olga Mikhailova and Vadim Kobzev, two lawyers representing the opposition leader, were driven away in a prison van, according to RIA, before being released a short time later.
Following the trial, Olga Mikhailova and Vadim Kobzev, two lawyers representing the opposition leader, were driven away in a prison van, according to RIA, before being released a short time later.
The lawyers were initially detained for failing to comply with demands to clear the road after the court session, according to the news agency.
Navalny was detained for the first time in February 2021, upon his arrival in Moscow from Berlin, Germany, where he had spent several months recovering from a nerve agent Novichok poisoning, which he blames on Russian security services and Russian President Vladimir Putin himself.
