Russia’s most prominent opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, has been given nine years in a “strict regime penal colony” in a fraud case rejected by supporters as fabricated.
Navalny was detained when he returned to Russia last year after surviving a poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin.
He is already serving three and a half years in jail for breaking bail conditions while in hospital.
A judge has now found him guilty of fraud and contempt of court.
Prosecutors accused him of stealing $4.7m (£3.5m) of donations given to his now banned organisations, including his anti-corruption foundation.
Delivering her verdict, Judge Margarita Kotova said Navalny had carried out “the theft of property by an organised group”.
He now faces the next nine years in a maximum-security prison, with much stricter conditions and far more remote than the jail in Pokrov, east of Moscow, where he had spent more than a year.
A visibly gaunt Navalny folded his arms and exchanged comments with his lawyer as the ruling was read out.
Accusing the authorities of jamming his “last word” in court, he tweeted that he and his supporters would continue to fight censorship to “bring the truth to the people of Russia”.
Shortly after the sentence was announced, Navalny’s lawyers were bundled into a police bus and briefly detained.
The trial was held at the penal colony in Pokrov, where Navalny was sent last year after being jailed for failing to observe bail conditions, while he was being given life-saving treatment in Berlin for the August 2020 nerve agent attack.
The Kremlin denies any involvement in poisoning Navalny, who has become President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest domestic critic.
Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said that while the attention of the world was focused on Ukraine, “another monstrous crime was being committed inside of Russia”. His colleagues alleged that the judge had discussed the trial with the Kremlin in recent weeks.
Ms Yarmysh said it was not just his freedom that was at stake but his life as well, because his accusers had already tried to kill him in Siberia.
The trial has been dismissed as a sham by Amnesty International, while German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has condemned it as incompatible with the rule of law. -BBC
