Putin critic Alexei Navalny has been found guilty and convicted of large-scale fraud.
It reports the news agency Reuters.
In an update on Tuesday afternoon, the news agency reports that Navalny has been sentenced by a Russian court to serve nine years in a high-security prison.
A verdict lawyer says Navalny plans to appeal.
Navalny is already serving a two-and-a-half year sentence for breach of release conditions in connection with a previous conviction for breach of the duty to report.
The critic is also said to have received a fine of 1.2 million rubles, which is equivalent to over 100,000 Norwegian kroner.
A matter of life and death
Lawyers arrested
Two of Navalny’s lawyers were also arrested, but later released.
Lawyers Olga Mikhailova and Vadim Kobzev were arrested while talking to journalists outside the penitentiary in the town of Pokrov where the trial was taking place.
It tells a journalist from the news agency AFP who was present. Navalny’s staff confirmed that the lawyers were arrested.
They were taken away in a police car, but released shortly afterwards.
– They let Olga Mikhailova and me go free again. They were even so kind that they drove us back to our car, Kobzev writes on Twitter.
Claims corruption
The breaches of the duty to report were caused by the fact that he was in a coma in the summer and autumn of 2020, and his allies have described the verdict as politically motivated.
According to the prosecution, the opposition leader is said to have spent more than NOK 40 million on the donations to his political organizations for private use.
The politician and his supporters have denied this.
Navalny has become particularly famous for his revelations of corruption in the Russian power apparatus. He and a number of his closest associates and supporters are terrorized by the authorities.
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