Yesterday, another trial of Alexei Navalny began. Of course, it is hard to call this a trial at all. Even courtroom shows on television look more realistic than this. Here is what happened on the first day.
Navalny is being tried for raising money for the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s work and for his political campaign. Not for stealing money, but for collecting donations. How can you steal something that people gave voluntarily? In the Investigative Committee’s view, you can. They found four people: two of them are stooges, and the other two are facing criminal cases of their own, meaning they are under pressure. And they forced them to appear as “victims.”
Since 2011, we have had more than 300,000 donors, but—let us stress—only four of them could be persuaded to give false testimony.
The scale of these so-called “thefts” is striking too. The Investigative Committee began by loudly claiming that 1 billion rubles had been stolen. In the case itself, it turned out, the amount is only a little over 2 million rubles. And, as a reminder, even that came from stooges. The country’s finest investigators still failed to find any real theft.
Alexei Navalny said he was jubilant while reading the case materials, because they are the best and final proof that the Anti-Corruption Foundation worked honestly all these years.
Now for the surprise. The prosecutor believes that Navalny not only stole donations, but is still doing so from prison colony custody—the very place where the trial is now being held. The claim concerns three transfers that one of the alleged victims sent to an account belonging—not to Alexei, but to Leonid Volkov—between February and June 2021. In other words, when Alexei was already in prison.
You might want to laugh at this absurdity, but in fact it is a legal trick. If Alexei allegedly “stole” something while already convicted, then he becomes a “repeat offender,” and they can transfer him to a maximum-security penal colony. That would mean fewer visits and letters, and instead of being held in a barracks with other prisoners, he would be kept alone in a locked cell.
From the courtroom, Alexei called on the Anti-Corruption Foundation to continue its work, and we will absolutely follow his advice—we will keep investigating corruption. We will keep telling the truth about Putin and his gang, who have looted our country.
As before, we very much need your help and support.
The proceedings themselves deserve special attention. They are being held off-site: the Lefortovo District Court of Moscow and the prosecutor’s office got up, gathered themselves, and traveled to Navalny’s penal colony. To another federal subject, a neighboring region. In the history of Russian courts, such cases have accounted for no more than one hundredth of one percent of all trials. The official explanation is coronavirus. Apparently, it is not allowed into secure facilities either.
Journalists were allowed to watch, but only from a distance. On television. The entire proceeding was broadcast to a screen in a separate room. Let us recall that this is formally an open hearing, which, in theory, anyone should be able to attend. Beneath the television hung a printed copy of the Russian national anthem. The words “glory to our free Fatherland” looked about as symbolic as the portrait of Yagoda (Genrikh Yagoda, a Stalin-era secret police chief) on the wall of the police station where Navalny was tried last time.
And to make Navalny look like a properly convicted man, he was not allowed to wear ordinary clothes. He sat through the hearing in prison uniform. Just in case the judge forgot what verdict she had been told to deliver.
At the very start of the day, Navalny asked for another lawyer, Vladimir Voronin, to be admitted to the case. But he was simply not allowed into the penal colony. The judge said that Voronin represents Lilia Chanysheva in an extremism case and therefore cannot represent Navalny at the same time. Except that Voronin was not allowed to defend Chanysheva either.
And to turn the whole case into a complete circus, they added a charge of insulting a judge to the alleged theft of donations. The prosecutor spent a long time, with great dramatic emphasis, reading out 104 phrases by which Navalny supposedly inflicted irreparable damage on the judicial system. You can find all of those words on the website presidentcase.com. Keep children away from the screen—there is even the word “damn” in there.
Putin wants to hide Navalny as far away as possible. He wants people to forget about him. But the harder he tries to do that, the more attention he draws to Alexei. He is neither forgotten nor hidden away.
The most important thing you can do right now is tell everyone about this trial.
The next hearing will take place on Monday, February 21. Subscribe to our channel—we will tell you about every day of this shameful process.
Freedom for Alexei Navalny!