The lawyer Olga Mikhailova, who defended Alexei Navalny, said that as justification for her arrest in absentia, the court used the wiretapping of her conversation with the oppositionist during a meeting in the colony. An interview with Mikhailova was published by Meduza.
According to the lawyer, on February 15, on the eve of the official date of Navalny’s death, the prosecution at the hearing on Mikhailova’s arrest in absentia provided the judge with a protocol of wiretapping her conversation with Navalny for April 11, 2023. In it, Navalny says: “Listen, I’m afraid to seem paranoid, but it seems that I’m being bullied here.”
“And this wiretapping is proof that I, Olga Mikhailova, am a member of the “extremist community.” And the judge [of the Basmanny District Court of Moscow, Natalya] Dudar, used this protocol as the only evidence of the need to select a preventive measure for me,” Mikhailova said in an interview with Meduza.
On the same day, April 11, 2023, a post about the politician’s stomach illness appeared on Twitter of another lawyer of Navalny, Vadim Kobzev. It says that the oppositionist is “simply being bullied” so that his health does not deteriorate sharply, but gradually but steadily.” According to Mikhailova, she wrote this post on Kobzev’s Twitter.
Together with Mikhailova, on February 15, the Basmanny District Court of Moscow arrested in absentia another Navalny lawyer, Alexander Fedulov. Three more of the politician’s lawyers—Vadim Kobzev, Alexey Liptser and Igor Sergunin—were detained in October last year and are now in pretrial detention. The oppositionist's defenders are accused of participating in an «extremist community» (Part 2 of Article 282.1 of the Criminal Code) due to the fact that they passed on letters from the oppositionist from the colony to his comrades.