According to Alexei Navalny’s team that runs his Twitter account while he is in a Russian high-security prison, prosecutors are seeking an additional 20-year prison sentence for the opposition leader on extremism charges. He is already in custody on a number of politically motivated charges and it already expected to serve a more than 10-year term which would see him released sometime in the early 2030s. However, these new goals by Russian prosecutors would extend that term well into the 2040s.
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— Alexey Navalny (@navalny) July 20, 2023
Below is a key timeline which outlines the current charges against Navalny, who is a fierce critic of President Putin.
On 17 January 2021 Navalny returned to Russia by plane from Germany, arriving at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow after the flight was diverted from Vnukovo Airport where he was detained following an almost fatal Nobochok poisoning in Germany.
The poison, according to a joint investigation by German, US, and Russian independent media as well as Bellingcat, a special unit from Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, was responsible for the attack on the popular anti-Putin figurehead.
Navalny, according to his defense team’s social media post, “is charged with 7 episodes under 6 articles: on the creation of an extremist community, calls for extremism, the creation of an NPO that infringes on the rights of citizens, the financing of extremism, as well as on the involvement of minors in dangerous acts and the rehabilitation of Nazism.”
“Navalny is now serving a nine-year sentence in his past case. He was also considered in the colony (at that time it was Pokrovskaya IK-2).”
His defense reportedly called witnesses including politicians Vladimir Kara-Murza, Ilya Yashin, Lilia Chanysheva and Alexei Gorinov, as well as the former editor-in-chief of ‘Ekho Moskvy’, Alexei Venediktov, the former mayor of Yekaterinburg Yevgeny Roizman and editor-in-chief of ‘Novaya Gazeta’, Dmitry Muratov.
He has also been a heavy critic of Russia operations in Ukraine, saying his nation is “floundering in a pool of either mud or blood, with broken bones, with a poor and robbed population, and around it lie tens of thousands of people killed in the most stupid and senseless war of the 21st century.”