Navalny says Putin is a traitor and ‘a naked king’ 

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny appeared in court via video yesterday , decrying Russia’s political leaders as traitors as his headquarters and regional offices disbanded while facing a prosecutor’s court motion to ban them as extremists.

Leonid Volkov, director of Mr Navalny’s Headquarters, which includes nearly 40 regional offices, said it was not safe to continue to operate with the court almost certain to confirm a ban.

Mr Navalny, looking thin, appeared in court for the first time since ending his hunger strike in a separate case as he appealed his February libel conviction. He lost the appeal.

Addressing the judge, he said the Moscow prosecutor’s motion to ban several of his organisations was an attempt “to make extremists of me and people like me, patriots of the country who protect the country from you traitors.”

Calling Russian president Vladimir Putin a “naked king,” he said that “twenty years of his fruitless rule have come to this result: the crown is slipping off his ears, there are lies on television, we have wasted trillions of rubles and our country continues to slide into poverty.”

He accused Mr Putin and his government of “turning Russians into slaves.”

The case on the extremist designation, to be heard by a closed Russian court, will rule on whether three organisations, including Mr Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, qualify as extremist groups. If confirmed, it would mark the Kremlin’s most sweeping effort to crush Mr Navalny’s organisation and would mean that his staff and supporters could face jail.

The opposition’s move to disband Mr Navalny’s Headquarters even before the court decision was based on its view that a ban was inevitable and that disbanding was necessary to protect staff.

A post on Mr Navalny’s webpage yesterday said there was “no doubt” the court would ban the organisations as extremist, although it asserted that the prosecution presented no evidence to justify the ban.

If the court bans the organisations, they would be barred from using platforms such as YouTube and Instagram to convey their messages – tools used with devastating effect to spread their allegations of corruption by Russian officials, members of Mr Putin’s United Russia party, oligarchs and the president himself. Supporters retweeting or reposting such materials could be prosecuted.

In the past, Mr Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation has published a series of hard-hitting reports on corruption, including “Putin’s Palace: History of the World’s Largest Bribe,” viewed on YouTube more than 116 million times.

Much of the evidence in the court case is a state secret, meaning the Russian public may never learn the basis of the case.

A lawyer for Mr Navalny’s organisations, Ivan Pavlov, said the classified materials in the case added up to 900 pages but that it was not clear why the materials were classified and announced plans to challenge the secrecy classification.

He said they were reference materials related to investigations and cases against Navalny and the Anti-Corruption Foundation.

Mr Navalny is serving a jail term of more than 2 and a half years in a case he calls political. He was arrested on his return from Germany, where he received treatment last year after being poisoned in August with a banned chemical nerve agent in an attack that the United States and the European Union have blamed on the Russian state.

In his court appearance appealing the libel conviction, Mr Navalny asked his wife Yulia to stand up so he could see her via video. “I’m awfully glad to see you,” he said, and she responded that it was good to see him too. He said he weighed 158 pounds (11st 4lb) and “I certainly look like a skeleton.”

Mr Navalny (44) last week announced an end to his hunger strike after he was given access to doctors he trusted. He was given four spoons of porridge on Wednesday and six yesterday, he said.

 

(© Washington Post)

Irish Independent