Three lawyers who once represented the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny went on trial Thursday in Russia, part of the Kremlin’s unrelenting crackdown on dissent that has in recent years reached levels unseen since the Soviet times.
Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin and Alexei Liptser were arrested in October 2023 on charges of involvement with an extremist group. The case has been widely seen as a means to ramp up pressure on the Kremlin’s fiercest foe at the time and to discourage defense lawyers from taking on political cases.
When they were arrested, Navalny was already serving a 19-year prison term on several criminal convictions, including extremism. The extremism charges against the opposition politician stemmed from a 2021 court ruling that outlawed his organizations in Russia — the Foundation for Fighting Corruption and a vast network of regional offices — as extremist groups.
That ruling, which exposed anyone involved with the organizations to prosecution, was condemned by Kremlin critics as politically motivated and designed to stifle Navalny’s political activities.
According to Navalny’s allies, authorities accused the lawyers of using their status as defense attorneys to pass letters from the imprisoned politician to his team, effectively serving as intermediaries between Navalny and what they consider to be his “extremist group.”
Navalny, a 47-year-old anti-corruption campaigner and outspoken opponent of President Vladimir Putin , was arrested in January 2021 upon his return from Germany, where he was recuperating from a nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin.
In February 2024, he suddenly died behind bars in what his team and his widow Yulia Navalnaya charged to be a murder ordered by the Kremlin. Officials have rejected the accusations.
Two more of Navalny’s lawyers are on a wanted list. One of them, Olga Mikhailova, who had defended the politician for a decade, said she had been charged in absentia with extremism after fleeing the country. The other, Alexander Fedulov, also said last year that he was no longer in Russia.
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