Igor Sergunin, Alexey Liptser and Vadim Kobzev (L-R) in court, 12 September 2024. Photo: Mediazona
Three lawyers who represented the late opposition politician Alexey Navalny have been sentenced to between 3.5 and 5.5 years in prison for participating in an “extremist organisation”, Russian independent news outlet Mediazona reported on Friday.
Vadim Kobzev was sentenced to five years and six months, Alexey Liptser to five years, and Igor Sergunin to three years and six months, with all three men to be banned from practising law for three years after serving their sentences, Mediazona said.
According to prosecutors, Kobzev, Liptser and Sergunin “used their status” to pass letters written by Navalny during his imprisonment in an Arctic penal colony to his associates, allowing him to continue acting as the “leader and head of an extremist organisation”. Only Sergunin pleaded guilty, while Kobzev and Liptser denied the charges against them.
Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation was banned as “extremist” by the Russian government in 2021, while Navalny himself remains on the Kremlin’s list of “terrorists and extremists” almost a year after his death in the Polar Wolf prison in the country’s far north.
The trial, which was held in the city of Petushki in Russia’s Vladimir region outside Moscow, was moved behind closed doors in September, following advice received by judge Yulia Shilova from Russia’s Centre for Combatting Extremism, which warned that employees of the Anti-Corruption Foundation based outside Russia were planning to engage in “provocations” and aimed to put pressure on witnesses.
Five people, four of whom were journalists, were detained outside the court building in the city of Petushki on Friday, Mediazona said.
Some of those who managed to gain entry to the courtroom for the verdict called out that the men were “heroes” and “Russia’s best people” when their sentences were announced, according to Mediazona.
“We are on trial for passing on Navalny’s thoughts to other people. But could Navalny imagine in 2011 that in 2021, all his activity over the past decade would be outlawed, and that his lawyers would be on trial by 2024?” Kobzev said in his closing statement to the court last week.
