“Behind Bars: Legal Warriors of Alexei Navalny Face Retribution in Russia”

Three attorneys who represented the deceased Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny have been sentenced to prison terms of up to five-and-a-half years on accusations of involvement in an “extremist organization”.

Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin, and Alexei Liptser were apprehended in October 2023 as Russian authorities escalated their pressure against the imprisoned Kremlin critic, who unexpectedly passed away last February while incarcerated in an Arctic prison facility.

They faced trial behind closed doors in Petushki, a locality located east of Moscow, and were charged with “leveraging their position” to transmit communications between Navalny and his associates.

Navalny labeled the trial as reminiscent of Soviet-era practices, pointing to it as a reflection of “the state of the rule of law in Russia.”

According to independent sources, Igor Sergunin was the sole lawyer among the three to acknowledge the charge and received a more lenient sentence of three-and-a-half years.

Alexei Liptser was sentenced to five years in a correctional facility, while Vadim Kobzev was handed a five-and-a-half-year term.

Kobzev’s attorney, Andrei Grivtsov, claimed that the evidence presented against them constituted an unlawful breach of privacy.

“They are not permitted to surveil conversations between a lawyer and a client in a penal colony under any circumstances – there is a clear legislative prohibition,” he stated to BBC Russian.

The trio of lawyers was tried near the penal colony in Pokrov, where Navalny was initially transferred when he returned to Russia in January 2021 after surviving a nerve agent poisoning, which he attributed to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Kremlin refuted these accusations, and Navalny remained in Russian correctional facilities until his death, situated north of the Arctic Circle and 1,900 km (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.

His spouse, Yulia Navalnaya, held Putin accountable for his demise, which officials attributed to “sudden death syndrome.”