Three lawyers who once represented late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny were jailed in Russia on Friday as part of a Kremlin crackdown on dissent that has reached levels not seen since Soviet times.
Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin and Alexei Liptser were sentenced to prison terms of between three and a half and five years by a court in the town of Petushki, about 100 kilometers east of Moscow. They were arrested in October 2023 on charges of involvement in extremist groups as authorities assessed Navalny’s networks.
The case was widely seen as a way to increase pressure on the opposition to discourage defense lawyers from taking on political cases.
At the time, Navalny was serving a 19-year prison sentence for several criminal convictions, including for 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 to the court on January 10: “We are being prosecuted because we passed on Navalny’s thoughts to others.”
Navalny’s networks were labeled extremist after a ruling in 2021 that banned his organizations – the Anti-Corruption Foundation and a network of regional offices – as extremist groups.
That ruling, which prosecuted anyone associated with the organizations, was seen by Kremlin critics as politically motivated and aimed at suppressing Navalny’s activities.
According to Navalny’s allies, authorities accused the lawyers of using their position to pass information from him to his team.
Died in prison
Navalny, an anti-corruption activist and outspoken opponent of President Vladimir Putin, was arrested in 2021 upon his return from Germany, where he was recovering from a nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. He was given a two and a half year prison sentence.
After two further trials, his prison sentence was extended to 19 years. He and his allies said the charges were politically motivated and accused the Kremlin of trying to put him in prison for life.
In December 2023, Navalny was transferred from a penal colony in the Vladimir region east of Moscow to a penal colony above the Arctic Circle, where he died in February at the age of 47 under circumstances that are still unclear. His widow Yulia Navalnaya and members of his team claimed he was killed on Kremlin orders. Officials have denied the allegation.
Two other Navalny lawyers, Olga Mikhailova and Alexander Fedulov, are on the 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 are considered political prisoners, according to human rights activists from Memorial, Russia’s most prominent human rights group, which won the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. The group is calling for their immediate release.
