The West has condemned a Russian court's decision to extend the jail time of Alexei Navalny, the Russian politician who dared to oppose President Vladimir Putin.
Navalny says charges are politically motivated and bogus.Jailed Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny had an extra 19 years in a maximum security penal colony added to his jail term in a criminal case which he said afterwards was designed to cow the Russian people into political submission.Navalny, President Vladimir Putin's biggest domestic critic, is already serving sentences totalling 11-and-a-half years on fraud and other charges that he says are also bogus.
"Nineteen years in a maximum security penal colony. The number does not matter. I understand perfectly well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence. Where the life sentence is measured by the length of my life or the length of the life of this regime," said Navalny.
The US State Department called the verdict "an unjust conclusion to an unjust trial", while the European Union condemned what it called another politically motivated ruling and called for Navalny's immediate release. The former blogger, lawyer and corruption investigator has cast himself as a political martyr whose aim is to demonstrate to Russians that it is possible to resist Putin, albeit at great cost."For a new, free, rich country to be born, it must have parents. Those who want it. Who expect it and who are willing to make sacrifices for its birth," Navalny said in his closing statement last month.
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