A court in Moscow has changed the one-year parole-like sentence handed to opposition politician Lyubov Sobol, a close associate of jailed anti-corruption campaigner Aleksei Navalny, to real prison time saying she violated the terms of her punishment by leaving the country.
Sobol's lawyer, Vladimir Voronin, tweeted on June 8 that the Simonovsky district court approved the request made by the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) to replace the parole-like sentence handed to Sobol in April 2021 for illegally forcing her way into the apartment of a Federal Security Service (FSB) officer hours after Navalny had published a recording of what he said was a phone conversation with the man.
During the 49-minute phone call, in which Navalny posed as an FSB official conducting an internal review, the officer, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, described the details of an operation to poison the Kremlin critic in August 2020.
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Sobol described the court's decision as a ruling designed to silence her.
According to the court's June 8 decision, the 34-year-old Kremlin critic must serve her sentence's remaining four months in prison.
In April, the same court ruled to replace Sobol's suspended 18-month sentence with an actual prison term in a separate case where she was found guilty of publicly calling for the violation of coronavirus safety precautions.
That charge has been widely used against those who were involved in countrywide protests against the jailing of Navalny, President Vladimir Putin's most vocal critic.
Sobol's lawyer said at the time that the court ruled his client must serve her sentence's remaining five months and 26 days in prison.
Sobol, who is currently out of Russia, has yet to comment on the court’s latest ruling.