The decision in this case was expected on Friday but the court in the town of Petushki, near Moscow, decided in the morning to postpone it until January 17, the defendants’ lawyers announced to the press. Alexei Liptser, Igor Sergunin and Vadim Kobzev were arrested in October 2023, when Vladimir Putin’s number one opponent was still alive, and then placed on the list of “extremists”. They are accused of having transmitted to Alexeï Navalny, imprisoned in Russia from January 2021 until his death in prison on February 16, 2024, information allowing him to “plan, prepare (…) and commit extremist crimes » from his cell, according to investigators.
House clos. These accusations of “extremism” are punishable in Russia by six years of detention, the prosecution having requested sentences of more than five years. The trial has been taking place since mid-September before a court in Petushki, in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow, where there is also a prison where Alexei Navalny was once incarcerated. After the start of the first hearing on September 12, all the debates took place behind closed doors, at the request of the prosecutor, despite protests from defense lawyers.
During the proceedings, Igor Sergunin pleaded guilty, according to independent Russian media Mediazona and Novaya Gazeta. Alexei Liptser and Vadim Kobzev did not do so. According to one of the defense lawyers, Roman Karpinski, the case is based on wiretapping of meetings between Mr. Navalny and his lawyers during his detention, which according to him constitutes a “violation of professional secrecy” of the prison administration, which transmitted these recordings to investigators.
Repression. “We are being tried for having transmitted Navalny’s thoughts to other people,” one of the accused, lawyer Vadim Kobzev, denounced in court at the end of December, quoted by Novaya Gazeta. The NGO Amnesty International urged Moscow to put an end to “arbitrary prosecutions” against lawyers. Since the start of the assault on Ukraine in February 2022, repression has hit all dissident voices in Russia.
Lawyers for opposition activists were once rarely imprisoned, although subject to increasing surveillance and threats. Over the past three years, several of them have had to leave the country to avoid being incarcerated. Two other former lawyers of Alexeï Navalny, Olga Mikhaïlova and Alexandre Fedulov, are abroad and are subject to an arrest warrant from the Russian authorities. Ms Mikhailova described the sentences requested by prosecutors as “savage”, assuring on Instagram that the three lawyers on trial had “defended Navalny honestly and professionally for many years”.
-Obscure circumstances. Charismatic anti-corruption activist, Alexeï Navalny was arrested in Moscow in January 2021 upon his return from Germany, where he was hospitalized after being the victim of a poisoning in Siberia which he blamed on the Kremlin, which has always denied it. He was then sentenced to several heavy sentences, including 19 years in prison in August 2023 for “extremism”. Navalny communicated mainly from his prison via messages sent to his lawyers, in which he notably denounced the offensive in Ukraine and called on the Russians to “resist”.
His organization, the Anti-Corruption Fund (FBK), has also been classified as “extremist” in Russia since 2021. The circumstances of his death in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024 remain obscure. Many of his former collaborators, refugees abroad, now work with his widow, Yulia Navalnaïa, who took up the torch of her husband’s movement in exile, without however succeeding in uniting around her a divided and scattered opposition. the foreigner.
© Agence France-Presse
