Russian federal prosecutors are seeking a 13-year prison sentence extension for Alexei Navalny, the popular Russian opposition leader who Putin tried to poison and who is now serving a 30 months prison sentence, Reuters said.
Imprisoned in a prison camp outside Moscow, Navalny was an unusually strong competitor for Putin in the previous presidential election, so much so that the Kremlin drummed up false charges prior to the last election to get him out of the way. These charges claim fraud and contempt of court charges.
“We’ve been saying that (Russian President Vladimir) Putin wants to keep Navalny in prison forever. The upcoming sentence has nothing to do with the law,” Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, wrote on Twitter. “Thirteen years for a fabricated case, for fake ‘victims’, for witnesses who had testified under pressure and then publicly denounced their testimonies in court.”