A top aide to Alexei Navalny warned about possible assassination of the Russian opposition leader after he was given a guilty sentence that added nine more years to his sentence in a maximum-security prison.
On Tuesday, the executive director of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, Vladimir Ashurkov, said in an interview that there was nothing that could stop Russian security services from killing a person anywhere in the world. He warned that this was much more of a threat to individuals inside a Russian prison, which he argued was a brutal place.
Potential Russian Assassination
The official denounced what he called the "bizarre" sentencing of Navalny which he said was imposed by a judge who was a "puppet of somebody sitting in the Kremlin." He added that the harsh sentence was part of a series of brutal crackdowns of dissent in the country amid the invasion of Ukraine.
Ashurkov noted that the unprovoked war on the neighboring country fueled opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin's government. He argued that the situation could eventually lead to the leader's downfall, as per Yahoo News.
Authorities convicted Navalny on fraud charges over allegations that he stole from his Anti-Corruption Foundation. The 45-year-old Russian opposition leader was already serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence when he was handed out his new sentence.
Navalny was kept in a detention center found east of the Russian capital after his February 2021 arrest for violation of probation terms, a decision that he said was politically motivated. After the sentence's announcement on Tuesday, Navalny posted on Twitter pondered about his new nine-year sentence and said he was only doing two days, the day he went in, and the day he gets out.
According to CNN, Russian state-owned news agency RIA noted that Navalny was fined roughly $11,500 and said that the opposition leader was planning to appeal the guilty verdict, citing his lawyer's statements. During the time that Judge Margarita Kotova read the accusations against Navalny, he stood by his lawyers unfazed, looking through some of the court documents.
Alexei Navalny's Sentence
For a long time, Navalny has been the subject of a campaign of harassment and intimidation by Russian authorities for his opposing views. Many see the new sentence as a move by the Kremlin to keep the opposition leader behind bars beyond the expiration in 2023 of his current prison sentence.
Navalny also said that the best support people could give him and other political prisoners were not sympathy and kind words but actions. He urged the public to conduct any activity against the deceitful and thievish Putin regime. He said that he wanted the people to take a stand against who he called "war criminals."
Despite being jailed previously, Navalny maintained his voice of opposition, only gaining momentum since Moscow decided to invade Ukraine nearly a month ago. He also sent letters to his lawyers who posted on his social media accounts to urge other people to protest against the war on Ukraine. He argued that the invasion was started by a group of "old crazy men who don't understand anything and don't want to understand anything," the New York Times reported.
