Prosecutor requests 20 more years in prison for Navalny over ‘extremism’ charges

20 July 2023, 14:34 GMT

The prosecutor has requested 20 years in a super-maximum security prison for Alexey Navalny over “extremism” charges, according to the politician’s lawyers.

The verdict will be pronounced on 4 August.

The trial took 16 court sessions, Mediazona reports. It was held behind closed doors, so no reporters or observers were allowed to attend.

Navalny's last plea

In this last court session before the verdict, Navalny said his last plea:
"I really like the wording of our compatriot, Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor Yuri Lotman. Speaking to students, he once said: “A man always finds himself in an unforeseeable situation. And then he has two legs to rest on: conscience and intellect.”
This is a very wise thought, as it seems to me. Any person should rest on both of these legs.
To rely only on one’s conscience is intuitively correct. But an abstract morality that does not take human nature and the real world into account will degenerate into either stupidity or atrocity, as it has happened more than once before.
But the reliance on the intellect without conscience is precisely what now lies at the core of the Russian state. Initially, this idea seemed logical to the elites. Using oil, gas and other resources, we will build an unscrupulous, but cunning, modern, rational, ruthless state. We will become richer than the tsars of the past. We have so much oil that even the common folk will get something from it. By exploiting this world of contradictions and the vulnerability of democracy, we will become leaders, and everyone will respect us. And if not respect, then at least fear.
And yet the same thing happens as everywhere else. The intellect, unconstrained by conscience, whispers: snatch, steal. If you are stronger, your interests are always more important than the rights of others.
Unwilling to rest on the foot of conscience, my Russia took a few big leaps, pushing everyone around, but then slipped and collapsed with a crash, destroying everything around it. And now it is floundering in a pool of either mud or blood, with broken bones and the poor, robbed population, surrounded by the tens of thousands of victims of the most stupid and senseless war of the XXI century.
Of course, sooner or later, it will rise again. And it is up to us to determine what it will rest on in the future."

Navalny is charged with six articles of the Criminal Code: “calls for extremism”, “creating a non-profit organisation that encroaches people’s rights”, “sponsoring extremism”, “creating an extremist community”, “involving underaged into commiting dangerous actions”, and “justifying nazism”.

He is facing up to 30 years behind bars. Daniel Kholodny, a former technical director of the Navalny LIVE YouTube channel, is another defendant in this trial. He has been in a pretrial jail for over a year.

The defence witnesses included imprisoned politicians Ilya Yashin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and Liliya Chanysheva, as well as former Yekaterinburg mayor Yevgeny Roizman and Novaya Gazeta’s chief editor Dmitry Muratov.