Jailed Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny had an extra 19 years added to his jail term on Friday in a criminal case that he and his supporters said had been trumped up to keep him behind bars and out of politics for even longer.
Navalny, President Vladimir Putin's fiercest domestic critic, is already serving sentences totalling 11-1/2 years on fraud and other charges that he says are also bogus. His political movement has been outlawed and declared "extremist".
Journalists were not let into the courtroom but able to watch proceedings on CCTV from a special media room nearby, although the feed was cut almost as soon as the sentence was pronounced. Dressed in dark prison uniform and flanked by his lawyers, Navalny smiled occasionally as he listened to the judge.
In a message posted on social media on Thursday, Navalny had predicted he would get a long jail term, but said it hardly mattered because he was also threatened with separate terrorism charges that could bring another decade. The U.S. 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.
In February, Putin ordered the FSB security service to raise its game to "identify and stop the illegal activities of those who are trying to divide and weaken our society"."Isn't this a bit much? Why such cruelties?," Markov wrote on the Telegram app. "He's not a murderer."
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