Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has said he faces life in prison after being charged with terrorism, in an escalation of Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on dissent after last year’s invasion of Ukraine.
Navalny said in a court session on Wednesday that Russian investigators had told Navalny that he would be tried by a military court for the alleged terrorist attacks he is accused of committing while he was in prison. He was speaking via video link from his prison cell ahead of a trial on charges of “extremism” he had already been charged with.
“They made ridiculous accusations for which I face 30 years in prison,” Navalny said on Wednesday, according to a transcript released by supporters. “Having a closed trial (..) is an attempt to make sure no one knows about it.”
Although charges have not been officially announced, the move by prosecutors appears to confirm what Navalny’s allies have feared all along — that the Putin regime plans to keep the country’s most prominent opposition figure and one of the most outspoken voices against the war in Ukraine behind bars. indefinitely.
Navalny, 46, was arrested in 2021 upon his return from Germany where he was recovering from an assassination attempt against him during his visit to Siberia using a nerve agent. He was later charged with nearly a dozen criminal offenses and convicted of fraud in June, when he was transferred to a maximum security prison in Melikhovo, 250 kilometers east of Moscow.
Navalny’s team said this month that they feared he could be poisoned again after falling seriously ill in prison, where he has been moved to solitary confinement 15 times. His supporters say the conditions in which he is being held in the prison, notorious for alleged prisoner abuse, amount to torture.
Putin said that Navalny is a CIA puppet that the United States is using to destroy Russia. In the months since Navalny’s arrest, Russia’s security services have smashed his national anti-corruption foundation.
After last year’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin ordered an even tougher crackdown: dissent against the war is essentially banned, while viewing or discussing anti-war content in private can result in harsh prison sentences.
Navalny, who became famous as an anti-corruption crusader and then led unprecedented street protests against Putin’s regime, said he expects to remain in prison as long as the Russian president remains in power.
He has jokingly compared himself to Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid campaigner who became a global icon during his 27-year imprisonment in South Africa and rose to become the country’s president.
The new accusations also appear aimed at silencing Navalny from within the Russian prison system. If convicted of terrorism, he could be transferred to another high-level security facility alongside convicts serving life sentences, where his contact with his supporters would be further reduced.
Ivan Zhdanov, the head of the exiled Navalny Foundation, said investigators came up with the terrorism charge after a pro-war military blogger was killed in a bombing in a St Petersburg cafe in April.
Zhdanov said it was not clear what form the terrorism charges would take, but added that they could carry up to life in prison if Navalny is accused of organizing attacks such as the blogger’s murder.
Many of Navalny’s exiled allies are also accused of being radicalized in their absence. Navalny’s chief of staff, Leonid Volkov, said he was accused of “justifying terrorism” for praising Klaus von Stauffenberg, the Wehrmacht officer who led a failed plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, and said killing Putin would be the “right and legal thing”. .