Three lawyers who represented the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny were sentenced to up to five years and six months in prison on charges of participating in an “extremist organization.”
Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin and Alexei Liptser arrested in October 2023 as pressure from Russian authorities intensifies on a jailed Kremlin critic who died suddenly in an Arctic prison in February Done.
They were tried in secret in Petushki, a town east of Moscow, and accused of “using their position” to pass messages between Navalny and his associates.
Navalny condemned the incident as indicative of the “state of the rule of law in Russia” as it was during the Soviet era.
According to an independent report, Igor Sergunin was the only one of the three to admit to the charges and received a light sentence of three years and six months.
Alexei Liptser was sentenced to five years in a penal colony, and Vadim Kobzev was sentenced to five years and six months.
Kobzev’s lawyer, Andrei Grivtsov, said the evidence against them amounted to an unlawful invasion of privacy.
“In principle, it is not allowed to eavesdrop on meetings between lawyers and clients in penal colonies. There is a direct legislative ban,” he told BBC Russian.
The three lawyers stood trial near the penal colony in Pokrov, where Navalny was first deployed when he returned to Russia in January 2021 after surviving a nerve agent attack that he blamed on Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
The Kremlin denied the charges, and Navalny remained in a Russian penal colony 1,900 kilometers northeast of Moscow, north of the Arctic Circle, until his death.
His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, blamed Putin’s death, which authorities described as “sudden death syndrome.”
