Lawyers for Alexei Navalny jailed by Russian court

Three lawyers who once represented the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny have been jailed as part of Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on dissent.

Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin and Alexei Liptser were jailed from three and a half to five years by a court in the town of Petushki, about 60 miles east of Moscow.

They were arrested in October 2023 on charges of involvement with extremist groups, as defined by the authorities.

At the time, Navalny was serving a 19-year prison term on several criminal convictions, including extremism. He died in a Russian prison camp in February 2023.

The independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported that Kobzev said in his final statement in court on January 10 that “we are being tried for transmitting Navalny’s thoughts to other people”.

Navalny’s networks were deemed extremist following a 2021 ruling that outlawed his organisations – the Foundation for Fighting Corruption and a network of regional offices – as extremist groups.

According to Navalny’s allies, authorities accused the lawyers of using their position to pass information from him to his team.

Navalny, an anti-corruption campaigner and outspoken opponent of President Vladimir Putin, was arrested in 2021 upon his return from Germany, where he was recuperating from a nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin. He was ordered to serve two and a half years in prison.

After two more trials, his sentence was extended to 19 years. He and his allies said the charges were politically motivated and accused the Kremlin of seeking to jail him for life.

His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, and members of his team alleged he was killed on orders from the Kremlin. Officials have rejected the accusation.

Two other Navalny lawyers, Olga Mikhailova and Alexander Fedulov, are on a wanted list but no longer live in Russia. Mikhailova, who defended Navalny for a decade, said she was charged in absentia with extremism.

Kobzev, Liptser and Sergunin have been deemed to be political prisoners, according to human rights advocates from Memorial, Russia’s most prominent rights group that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. The group demands their immediate release.