2021-02-02 17:37:25 | Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny jailed for two years and eight months | Alexei Navalny

A Moscow court has sentenced Alexei Navalny to two years and eight months in a prison colony in a landmark decision for Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on the country’s leading opposition figure.

Navalny, who has accused the Russian president and his allies of stealing billions, was sentenced to prison for violating parole from a 2014 sentence for embezzlement. He said the case against him was politically motivated.

The judge subtracted 10 months he spent under house arrest from his original three-and-a-half-year sentence as she delivered the verdict.

The court’s decision makes Navalny the most prominent political prisoner in Russia and may be the most important verdict against a foe of Putin’s since the 2005 jailing of the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

In a fiery speech from a Moscow city courtroom decorated with portraits of Cicero and Montesquieu ahead of the sentencing, Navalny accused Putin of ordering his assassination and said that the Russian leader’s “only method is killing people”.

He flashed a heart sign with his hands to his wife, Yulia, when he later returned to learn his sentence.

The Kremlin’s decision to send Navalny to prison came despite the threat of historic street protests and international condemnation from the US government and other foreign leaders. Diplomats from more than half a dozen western countries attended the court.

But the sentencing showed the exhaustion of Russia’s leaders with Navalny, who even from jail released a detailed investigation into a £1bn Black Sea palace allegedly built for Putin’s use.

He was arrested upon returning to Russia last month after surviving in August 2020 a suspected FSB assassination attempt with a novichok poison similar to that used in Salisbury in 2018.

Russian prison officials had said while Navalny recovered in Germany that they would seek to jail him for violating parole in the 2014 case in an apparent attempt to keep the Kremlin critic in exile, but he flew back all the same.

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Who is Alexei Navalny?

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Born in 1976 just outside Moscow, Alexei Navalny is a lawyer-turned-campaigner whose Anti-Corruption Foundation investigates the wealth of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. 

He started out as a Russian nationalist, but emerged as the main leader of Russia’s democratic opposition during the wave of protests that led up to the 2012 presidential election, and has since been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side. 

Navalny is barred from appearing on state television, but has used social media to his advantage. A 2017 documentary accusing the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, of corruption received more than 30m views on YouTube within two months. 

He has been repeatedly arrested and jailed. The European court of human rights ruled that Russia violated Navalny’s rights by holding him under house arrest in 2014. Election officials barred him from running for president in 2018 due to an embezzlement conviction that he claims was politically motivated. Navalny told the commission its decision would be a vote ‘not against me, but against 16,000 people who have nominated me; against 200,000 volunteers who have been canvassing for me’. 

There has also been a physical price to pay. In April 2017, he was attacked with green dye that nearly blinded him in one eye, and in July 2019 he was taken from jail to hospital with symptoms that one of his doctors said could indicate poisoning. In 2020, he was again hospitalised after a suspected poisoning, and taken to Germany for treatment. The German government later said toxicology results showed Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent.

Photograph: Pavel Golovkin/AP

“Someone did not want me to take a single step on my country’s territory as a free man. And we know who and we know why – the hatred and fear of one man, living in a bunker, whom I offended by surviving when he tried to have me killed,” he said of Putin.

“His only method is killing people. However much he pretends to be a great geopolitician, he’ll go into history as a poisoner.”

“This isn’t a political rally,” the judge interrupted him at one point. “Let’s not do politics here.”

The 16-minute speech may be one of the opposition leader’s last public orations in the coming years. Investigators are preparing to bring new charges against Navalny on fraud and other charges that could carry a sentence of another decade in a penal colony if they are brought to trial.

In his remarks, Navalny called on his supporters not to fear the government, saying: “You can’t imprison the whole country.” More than 5,000 people were detained in nationwide protests this weekend and senior Navalny aides have been swept up in government raids.

“Locking me up isn’t difficult,” Navalny told the court. “This is happening to intimidate large numbers of people. They’re imprisoning one person to frighten millions.”

He called the court case a “performance”. “This is what happens when lawlessness and tyranny become the essence of a political system, and it’s horrifying,” he said.

For years, the government had harassed Navalny, holding him under house arrest, jailing his aides and imprisoning his brother for three-and-a-half years in 2014. But until Tuesday, it had stopped short of giving him a long prison sentence, apparently fearing a backlash.

In 2013, a judge abruptly set Navalny free on parole one day after thousands protested against his five-year prison sentence on the streets outside the Kremlin. The sudden about-face confirmed what many in the opposition believed: that important court decisions are made in the Kremlin.

The government’s mood apparently changed following the failed assassination attempt and a deeply embarrassing investigation by Bellingcat, which exposed the attack as the work of an FSB hit squad who had shadowed Navalny around Russia for years. In a flourish, Navalny managed to elicit a confession from a member of the FSB, the Russian intelligence service that Putin formerly headed.

Before the verdict, hundreds of police were deployed around the Moscow city court in expectation of fresh protests. By 5pm, at least 235 people had been arrested, according to the OVD-Info monitor, although the court had yet to deliver a decision.

The hearing was held in an oak-panelled courtroom at a packed Moscow city court, where authorities barred reporters from taking photographs or videos of the proceedings. Dressed in a blue hoodie, Navalny joked with his family and needled the judge and prosecutor, who cross-examined him on whether he had missed parole check-ins from earlier in 2020s.

From a glass-windowed holding cell called an “aquarium”, he told his wife: “They showed you in my cell. They say you keep violating public order. You’re a bad girl. I’m proud of you.”

Diplomats at the hearing were chased by state television journalists peppering them with questions about whether they were extending Navalny political support. Navalny’s allies have also called for new sanctions against some of Putin’s closest allies and the officials involved in his case.

Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry, called the western diplomats’ presence “meddling”.

“It exposes the mean and illegal role of the collective west in attempts to restrain Russia,” she said. “Or is it an attempt to put psychological pressure on the judge?”