Next week, a new trial against Alexei Navalny begins. The authorities, fearing a repeat of the 2021 winter protests, decided to hold an off-site meeting away from Moscow. The trial will take place in the colony where the oppositionist is serving a term in the Yves Rocher case. As a rule, off-site meetings are extremely rare; usually because of the defendant's illness. But a separate Code of Criminal Procedure has been written for Navalny. We could be convinced of this a year ago, when a judge specially visited him at the Khimki police department to select a measure of restraint. We recorded more details about the date of the hearings and about other equally important events in the next Chronicles of Current Repressions.
“The Navalny Case”
On February 15, Judge Margarita Kotova of the Lefortovo Court will hold the first hearing on the case of Alexei Navalny in a correctional colony (IK-2) in Pokrov, Vladimir Region.
On the morning of February 8, Navalny's associates reported that they were going to transfer the oppositionist to the capital's pre-trial detention center so that he could participate in the new process in person. But later, the lawyers clarified that the defendant would not participate in the hearings even via video link, which was previously used when considering claims and appeals filed by him against the colony. Instead, the court decided to hold an off-site session right in the colony. The press service of the court is still silent — it does not explain the reason for such a decision and is in no hurry to tell journalists the rules of work on the day of the meeting.
Companions of the oppositionist believe that this is due to the desire to make the court as closed as possible — without the press and without prying eyes.
The new «Navalny case» consists of six episodes. The first four relate to donation fraud (part 4 of article 159 of the Criminal Code): according to investigators, the politician spent about 350 million rubles on himself, collected for the work of his organizations. We are talking about spending on the 2018 presidential campaign. Two more episodes are connected with last year’s libel trial against war veteran Ignat Artemenko: during the process, the politician received more than a dozen remarks from the judge, which eventually resulted in a criminal case on insulting the participants in the trial and judge Vera Akimova (part 1, part 2 article 297 of the Criminal Code). In total, the oppositionist faces up to 15 years in prison on the charges brought against him.
The “Safronov Case”
The accusation and the materials of the case of journalist Ivan Safronov do not contain information on how and from whom he got access to state secret, his lawyer Ivan Pavlov said (we are forced to point out that it is included by the Ministry of Justice in the register of media outlets performing the functions of a “foreign agent”).
Recently, the defense has finished familiarization with the materials of the case. “It’s not difficult to explain the strong pressure of the defenders and the obstruction of our work. The accusers are afraid of being a laughingstock, because if we had extracts from the criminal case or a computer in the investigator’s office, we would show them all their secrets on the Internet, ”Pavlov wrote in his Telegram channel.
The FSB also accuses Safronov of receiving illegal income from «criminal activities.» As Pavlov notes, the source or method of obtaining this income is also not described.
“The accusation is devoid of specificity and credibility, and numerous petitions from the defense for an explanation by the prosecution were ignored,” the lawyer concluded.
The defense got acquainted with the materials of the case on treason (Article 275 of the Criminal Code) in two weeks. In total, there are 23 volumes in the case, while investigator Chaban forbade lawyers to make extracts even from the part that does not contain state secrets — the defenders had to memorize and memorize the details by ear. Also this week, it became known that the First Court of Appeal of General Jurisdiction left Safronov in custody and recognized the extension of the arrest as legal.
Ivan Safronov in First Court of Appeal of General Jurisdiction in Moscow. Photo: RIA Novosti
The case of the Rammstein video repost
The Third Court of Cassation of General Jurisdiction in St. Petersburg sent for reconsideration the case of the former head of the Arkhangelsk headquarters of Navalny (the organization was recognized by the Moscow City Court as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation) Andrey Borovikov, who was accused of distributing pornography because of the repost of the Rammstein video.
According to Pavel Chikov, the head of Agora, on his Telegram channel, the case was sent for a new appeal to the Arkhangelsk Regional Court. Borovikov was left in custody for three months, but the lawyers will seek a change in the preventive measure.
Due to the fact that Borovikov added a clip to his videos on VKontakte in 2014, in April 2021 the Lomonosovsky District Court of Arkhangelsk sentenced him to 2.5 years in a general regime colony in the case of distributing pornography via the Internet (clause “b” part 3 of article 242 of the Criminal Code). In July, Borovikov's term was reduced by three months because he had a baby.
Andrey Borovikov