A Moscow court has placed Russian opposition figure Yulia Navalnaya on trial for involvement in an “extremist community.” The Basmanni district court in the Russian capital has ordered the widow of dissident Alexei Navalny, who died in mysterious circumstances at the age of 46 in a prison in the Arctic Circle in February, to be held in absentia. “Oh, isn’t this the usual procedure: declaration as a foreign agent, opening of a criminal case, and then arrest?” I have answered with irony Navalnaya from exile through X, the old Twitter.
“The period of pre-trial detention is counted from the moment of extradition (from Navalnaya) to the Russian Federation or from the moment of her arrest on the territory of the Russian Federation,” the court announced in a statement. However, it is unlikely that the opposition figure will return to her country in the medium term: the dissident and her children were the notable absentees at the mass farewell to the opposition figure at Moscow’s Borisov cemetery on March 1.
The Russian judiciary has not provided any details about the charges against the opposition leader. “Yulia Navalnaya has been included in the list of people declared in absentia. You will not find specific reasons or links to the materials on the court website; they simply do not exist,” stressed the head of the legal department of the organization founded by Navalny, Vyacheslav Gimadi, on social networks. “They will think about it,” the dissident herself replied.
Navalnaya took over from her husband at the head of his anti-corruption foundation after his death. The Russian authorities had banned this NGO as an “extremist organisation” in 2021, a few months after Navalny’s arrest upon his return to Moscow in January of that year. The dissident, despite the pleas of those close to him, decided to return to his country after recovering from Novichok poisoning in a German clinic during a trip through the Russian interior.
Navalny’s widow has also been elected president of the Human Rights Foundation, a dissident platform previously headed by Free Russia Forum leader Garry Kasparov. “Vladimir Putin is a murderer and a war criminal. His place is in prison, and not in The Hague, in a cozy cell with a TV, but in Russia, in the same colony and in the same two-by-three-meter cell in which he killed Alexei,” Navalnaya added in her tweet.
The opposition figure faces up to six years in prison. Other members of the Anti-Corruption Foundation have been jailed since it was banned. Among other cases, the platform’s head in Ufa, Lilia Chanysheva, was sentenced to nine years in prison. Several Russian journalists who witnessed Navalny’s trials have also been arrested and accused of being part of the opposition figure’s network. For example, Sergei Karelin and Konstantin Gabov, from the American Associated Press (AP) and the British Reuters, respectively, are also labelled “extremists” by the Kremlin.
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