State prosecutors have requested that a Russian court sentence jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny to another 20 years in a penal colony on charges that include extremism.
The state news agency TASS said that prosecutors also asked at a hearing on July 20 that Navalny’s co-defendant, Daniel Kholodny, be given a 10-year sentence. TASS cited a lawyer as saying a final verdict in the case will be announced on August 4.
The Kremlin critic and anti-corruption crusader is accused under six articles of the Russian Criminal Code, including creating and financing an extremist community, calling for extremism, rehabilitating Nazism, and involving minors in dangerous acts.
The case deals with Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), which, at the request of the prosecutor's office, was declared extremist in 2021 -- banning all its activities in Russia.
Navalny has said on social media that he expects a sentence of 15 years to 20 years, despite what he claims to be “nonsensical” evidence presented during his closed-door trial, including lyrics from the rapper Morgenshtern and a cryptopayment that attempts to tie Navalny to American billionaire Warren Buffet.
The 47-year-old lawyer, who pleaded not guilty to all charges, has sarcastically referred to the "amazing trial" and said that the rap lyrics were “quite strong evidence that I, as the prosecution says, planned the overthrow of Vladimir Putin by force.”
In his most recent Telegram post, Navalny released a statement that fiercely criticized the Russian government, saying the country “is floundering in a pool of either mud or blood, with broken bones, with a poor, population that has been robbed, and [with] tens of thousands of those who died in the most stupid and senseless war of the 21st century.”
He continues to call the Russian state “intelligence without a conscience" but ended his statement, which he called “The last word of Aleksei Navalny,” with optimism.
“But sooner or later, of course, it will rise again. And it depends on us what it will rely on [intelligence or a conscience] in the future.”
The trial began June 6 after Navalny's legal team and Kholodny, who is the technical director of the Navalny LIVE YouTube channel, requested the recusal of the judge, Andrei Suvorov, saying the trial should be held in Moscow as they both are officially registered there, and the trial is about allegations related to Moscow.
Suvorov rejected the motion and decided on June 19 that the trial would be held behind closed doors in a makeshift courtroom at the penal colony where Navalny is being held 260 kilometers east of Moscow.
Navalny is currently serving a combined 11-and-1/2-year prison sentence for prior charges. He was arrested in January 2021 upon his return to Russia from Germany, where he had been undergoing treatment for a near-fatal poisoning with a Novichok-type nerve agent that he says was ordered by Putin.
The European Union added the chief of the Russian prison camp where Navalny is incarcerated to its sanctions list on July 20.