Russia jails lawyers who acted for late opposition leader Alexei Navalny

Three lawyers who acted for the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny have been sentenced to five and a half years in prison on charges of participating in an “extremist organization”.

Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin and Alexei Liptser were arrested in October 2023 as Russian authorities stepped up pressure on the jailed Kremlin critic, who died suddenly last February in an Arctic prison colony.

They were tried behind closed doors in Petushki, a town east of Moscow, and accused of “using their status” to pass messages between Navalny and his colleagues.

Navalny had condemned the case as in Soviet times, and an indication of “the state of the rule of law in Russia”.

Igor Sergunin was the only one of the three to admit the charge, according to independent reports, and was given a lighter sentence of three and a half years.

Alexei Liptser was imprisoned for five years in a penal colony and Vadim Kobzev was given five and a half years.

Kobzev’s lawyer, Andrei Grivtsov, said the evidence against them was an illegal invasion of privacy.

“They are not allowed to explain the meetings between a lawyer and a client in a penal colony in principle – there is a direct legislative ban,” he told BBC Russian.

The three lawyers were put on trial near the penal colony in Pokrov, where Navalny was initially sent when he returned to Russia in January 2021, after surviving an attack by nerve agents who blamed Russian leader Vladimir Putin .

The Kremlin denied the allegation and Navalny remained in Russian penal colonies until his death, north of the Arctic Circle and 1,900 km (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.

His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, blamed Putin for his death, which authorities attributed to “sudden death syndrome.”