Lawyers who defended the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny were arrested in Russia

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

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

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

Navalny condemned this case as in Soviet times and an indicator of the “state of the rule of law in Russia.”

Igor Sergunin was the only one of the three to plead guilty, according to independent sources, and received a lighter sentence of three and a half years.

Alyaksei Liptser received five years of imprisonment in a general regime colony, Vadim Kobzev – five and a half years.

Kobzev’s lawyer Andrei Hryvtsov said that the evidence against them constitutes illegal interference in private life.

“It is forbidden in principle to eavesdrop on meetings between a lawyer and a client in the colony – there is a direct legal prohibition,” he told the Russian BBC.

The three lawyers were tried near the prison in Pokrov, where Navalny was originally sent when he returned to Russia in January 2021 after surviving a nerve agent attack he blamed on Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

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

His widow, Yulia Navalnya, blamed Putin for his death, which the authorities are writing off as “sudden death syndrome.”