He may be in a Russian prison, partway through a trial that could see his sentence increased by 30 years, but Alexei Navalny isn’t giving up
Alexei Navalny’s latest trial began on 19 June at the maximum-security Penal Colony 6, some 150 miles east of Moscow. Already serving a nine-year sentence for various trumped-up offences, Vladimir Putin’s last heavyweight political opponent was facing a further 30 years for allegedly inciting and financing extremism and ‘rehabilitating Nazi ideology’ – an apparent reference to his support for Ukraine.
The proceedings were briefly transmitted via a scarcely audible video feed to a separate room for journalists. Navalny, in a black prison uniform, rebuked the judge for his ‘seriously limited’ independence and for failing to let his parents into the courtroom. He said he had been given 3,828 pages of documents detailing the offences he had purportedly committed while isolated in prison, but protested: ‘Although it’s clear from the size of the tomes that I am a sophisticated and persistent criminal, it’s impossible to find out exactly what I’m accused of.’ He complained that ‘in the past, whenever I said the word “Putin”, they simply turned off the microphone and stopped the video feed’.
As if on cue, the judge ruled that the rest of the trial would be held behind closed doors.
Kira Yarmysh, 33, Navalny’s spokeswoman and one of his closest aides throughout the tumultuous past decade, viewed the images in a secret sanctuary somewhere in Europe. In a Zoom interview two days later, she told me that it was upsetting to see how thin her boss had become, but reassuring to see he had not lost his fearlessness, defiance or sense of humour.