Navalny’s arrival at court was to receive sentencing for a charge of defamation. The judge upheld his charge, fining Navalny 850,000 roubles. Experts labeled the punishment as another way for the Russian government to silence Navalny and his close aides.
Currently, Navalny is already experiencing a two-and-a-half-year sentence for embezzlement, criticized by human rights advocates and government officials alike. The United States and the European Union placed strict sanctions on the Kremlin following Navalny’s initial arrest.
As for Navalny’s health, a video of his remarks during his court hearing were released, showing a gaunt man in a dimly lit room. Navalny commented on his appearance, saying “I am a creepy skeleton…I weighed this much in seventh grade.” The 24-day hunger strike was an answer to what Navalny claims to be a reprehensible lack of medical care for himself and other prisoners inside of his cell.
The defamation punishment comes directly after two of Navalny’s closest Anti-Kremlin allies, Leonid Volkov and Ivan Zhdanov, were named suspects in “opening a non-governmental organisation” tasked with endangering the lives and rights of Russian citizens. Zhdanov and Volkov are currently working to dismantle a network of 40 offices for Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Federation (ACF) after pressure from Putin, but Volkov predicts that dissenters will continually face “mass arrests.”
Similarly, Ivan Pavlov, the lead lawyer for much of the Russian opposition, has been arrested. The Russian’s Federal Security Service (FSB) apprehended Pavlov in an early morning raid of his hotel room. A group of lawyers spoke on the arrest, commenting, “We believe that these actions by law enforcement are aimed exclusively at scaring Ivan and his colleagues in order to force them to reject an active position in defending their clients.” Pavlov was later released but is still unable to use any electronic devices.
The detainment came only 4 days after Pavlov agreed to take on Navalny’s lawsuit against the Russian government for the forced closure of ACF.
Pavlov is already the leader of a group of lawyers called Team 29, named after an article of the Russian constitution allowing freedom of thought and speech. The group and its clients have been the repeated targets for a barrage of arrests, one of which was Ivan Safronov, a journalist accused of spying for NATO in 2020.
Dmitri S. Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin, remarked in a press conference that the string of opposition-related arrests were “not part of a unified trend.” He added, “These are different episodes and different cases.”
To counter ever-increasing sanctions from the United States, Russia forbade any non-American citizens from working at the Moscow-located US embassy. More than three-fourths of the staff were laid off as a result. The embassy vowed to stop processing all non-immigrant travel requests into the United States, including for both tourism and travel.
In response to the European Union, Russia barred entrance into the country for eight top European officials, including David Sassoli, president of the European Parliament and Vera Jurova, a Czech who is a vice president of the European Commission.
While Russia vehemently denies any wrongdoing in its arrests, the degradation of its relationship with both America and the EU could have considerable consequences around the world.
Background information on Alexei Navalny’s imprisonment and initial poisoning can be found here, and more on the protests that followed can be found here.
