“When you will all be burning in hell, your grandfathers will be adding wood to your fires.” “What do you want to achieve – do you want short-term control, to fight with future generations, to fight for the future of Russia?” Navalny asked the court. Navalny cast the prosecution’s “facts” as “lies” – and compared them to the lies he said Putin, Russia’s paramount leader since the last day of 1999, had used to begin the Feb. Russia denies Navalny’s claims that Russia’s secret police poisoned him with Novichok. He earned admiration from the disparate Russian opposition for voluntarily returning to Russia in 2021 from Germany where he underwent treatment for what Western laboratory tests showed was an attempt to poison him with a nerve agent in Siberia. His appeal was rejected by the court.Ī former lawyer who rose to prominence more than a decade ago by lampooning Putin’s elite and voicing allegations of corruption on a vast scale, Navalny has long forecast Russia could face seismic political turmoil through revolt. He denies all the charges against him and says they were fabricated to thwart his political ambitions. Navalny, by far Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, was appealing against a nine-year jail sentence he was handed in March for fraud and contempt of court, on top of 2-1/2 years he is already serving.
The judge repeatedly interrupted Navalny. “One madman has got his claws into Ukraine and I do not know what he wants to do with it – this crazy thief,” Navalny said of Putin. “This is a stupid war which your Putin started,” Navalny, 45, told an appeal court in Moscow via video link from a corrective penal colony.