Russia has sentenced the late opposition leader Alessi Navalny’s lawyers to years in prison.

Russia on Friday sentenced the three defendants. Alexei Navalny Many years in prison for bringing messages from the dead opposition leader from prison to the outside world.

The sentence comes amid a huge uproar during the busy season. Moscow’s attack on Ukraine And Russia has sought to punish Navalny’s allies even after his unexplained death in an Arctic prison colony last February.

Vadim Kobzev, Alexey Liptser and Igor Sergunin were found guilty of participating in an “extremist organization” in Petushki city court.

Kobzev, who was a high-profile member of Navalny’s legal team, was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison, Liptser five years and Sargunin three-and-a-half years.

Navalny’s widow in exile; Yulia Navalnaya“They are political prisoners and should be released immediately,” the lawyers said.

They were almost the only ones who visited Navalny in prison when he was serving his 19-year sentence.

Navalny, Putin’s main political rival, has been communicating with the world through messages his team has published on social media through his lawyers. Passing letters and messages through lawyers is a common practice in Russian prisons.

The men were sentenced after a closed-door hearing at the city’s Pokrov prison, 72 miles east of Moscow, before Navalny was taken to a remote colony high above the Arctic.

Kobzev appeared in court last week and said: “We are on trial for communicating Navalny’s ideas to other people.”

The court found that the men used the criminal Navalny as a lawyer when they visited him … They regularly transmitted information between members of the extremist community and Navalny, including those wanted and hiding outside the Russian Federation.

This, he said, allowed Navalny to continue “planning events and creating conditions for committing crimes in an extremist manner.”

Navalny condemned the arrest of the lawyers in October 2023 as “outrageous” and part of a campaign to isolate him in prison.

The verdict comes just days before four independent journalists accused of aiding Navalny are due back in court to face up to six years in prison.

They also come four years after Navalny bravely returned to Russia — January 17, 2021 — after recovering from a poison attack that nearly killed him.

In a message to the outside world, Navalny condemned the Kremlin’s attack on Ukraine as “criminal” and told his supporters to “not give up hope”.

Just last week, Kobzev compared Moscow’s crackdown on protests to Stalin-era repression.

“Eight years have passed … and at the Petushki court, people will be tried again for defaming officials and government agencies,” he said in a speech to the Novaya Gazeta newspaper.

While Russia continues to imprison its citizens in opposition to the Kremlin, prosecutions of lawyers who represent those people are still rare.

The UIA International Association of Lawyers has warned that the trial will raise questions about the future of the profession in Russia.

The organization said last month that “regardless of political views and actions, client protection is a cornerstone of the rule of law and a universal principle enshrined in international legal standards.”

He said the hearing set a dangerous precedent by “preventing” lawyers from representing their clients in distressed cases.

International human rights organizations and some Western countries condemned the sentence.

“Today is another low point in the terrible human rights situation in the Russian Federation,” Dutch Foreign Minister Kaspar Veldkamp said on social media on Friday.

Navalny’s team has accused prison officials of secretly filming Navalny’s meetings – to keep them secret – with his lawyers and publishing the footage on social media.

Last week, Navalnaya said that Russia refused to remove her dead husband from the list of terrorists and extremists.

Russian financial watchdog Rosfinmonitoring published a December letter to Navalny’s mother that said the late opposition leader was still under investigation for money laundering and “financing terrorism.”

“Why does Putin need this? Obviously, it does not prevent Alexei from opening a bank account,” Navalnaya said. “Putin is doing this to scare you.”