A photo taken from a TV screen during a live broadcast of the court hearing shows Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny hugging his wife, Yuliaf. /Alexander Nemenov/AFP
Russian President Vladimir Putin's main political opponent, Alexei Navalny, went on trial from inside prison on Tuesday, in a new fraud case that could potentially lead to his jail time being extended by more than a decade.
Navalny appeared via video link dressed in prison uniform at the makeshift court inside his penal colony. Smiling next to his wife, Yuliya Navalnaya, guards stood on either side of them.
Rights groups have criticized authorities for holding the closed-door hearing inside the maximum-security prison in Pokrov, which is around 100 kilometers east of Moscow. Navalny said he was being tried in prison because Russian officials are "scared of what I will say."
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"I have not yet been found guilty in this case, but they keep me in uniform, so a grandmother watching on television will think 'well, he's in prison anyway,'" he continued.
Navalny has already been behind bars for a year after surviving a poison attack that he blames on the Kremlin. He is currently serving a two-and-a-half year sentence but the fresh fraud charges could see his time behind bars significantly extended.
Journalists watch the live broadcast of the court hearing on the first day of the new trial. /Alexander Nemenov/AFP
The new case against Navalny was launched in December 2020, while the 45-year-old was recovering in Germany after surviving a nerve agent poisoning. Investigators accuse Navalny of stealing more than $4.7 million in donations for personal use that were given to his political organizations. These new charges carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
The start of the trial coincides with a week of intensive talks between Russia and the West over Ukraine. Maria Pevchikh, a Russian investigative journalist, suggested that the trial was "purposefully scheduled to coincide with the most tense week of the Ukrainian crisis."
"They are planning to extend his sentence for another 15 years while everyone's distracted with something bigger."
Russia has accused Germany of withholding evidence about how a flight was scheduled to collect Navalny from Russia with senior diplomat Sergey Lavrov saying he was told it was classified military information.
Lavrov has recently noted in an interview with TASS that Germany did not have the capability to detect toxins in Navalny's blood with the speed in which it was confirmed.
"Germany, France, and Sweden swore that they don't possess such technologies. It is impossible to identify any substance in a human organism in three days without having corresponding technologies - any chemist will tell you that," he explained.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has condemned the legal proceedings against Navalny. Speaking after talks in Moscow with Putin, he said: "My position on the Navalny case is very clear: his judgment is incompatible with the principles of the rule of law and I have expressed this view on many occasions."
"Germany stands for peace and justice," Kira Yarmysh, Navalny's press secretary and assistant, wrote on Twitter. "And now its stance on this is more important than ever."
Following his arrest, Russian authorities have described Navalny's political organizations and supporters as "extremists."