According to the Anti-Corruption Fund (FBK), which he founded, a new trial will be opened next week against the imprisoned Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny. The court hearing will begin on April 26, FBK director Ivan Zhdanov announced on his Telegram channel.
According to another of Navalny’s confidants, Leonid Volkov, the allegations of extremism are involved. Accordingly, the opposition faces 35 years in prison. Officially, there is no information about an imminent further trial.
“It’s a political case in which all of the FBK’s work since 2011 has been declared extremist and Navalny has been sentenced to up to 35 years in prison,” Volkov wrote on Twitter. The extremely long imprisonment results from the combination of several criminal offenses for which no life imprisonment is provided.
Navalny, who narrowly survived a poison attack in 2020, was arrested at a Moscow airport in early 2021 immediately after returning from Germany, where he was undergoing treatment and rehabilitation. He was initially charged with violating probation conditions from a previous trial. He was later sentenced to another prison term on charges including fraud. According to the previous sentences, he has to sit in prison until 2032.
Most recently, Navalny’s lawyer Wadim Kobsev reported on the deteriorating state of health of the 46-year-old in solitary confinement. Since last summer, Navalny has been locked in an isolation cell 13 times in the Melekhovo penal camp in the Vladimir region, around 250 kilometers northeast of Moscow. In addition, the prison authorities provoked the Kremlin critic to open a new trial against him.
