The former head of a neighborhood department of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny‘s marketing campaign organisation was sentenced to 9 years in a Russian jail for collaborating in an “extremist community”, Navalny’s crew stated on Monday.
Vadim Ostanin, who had run Navalny’s native headquarters within the Siberian metropolis of Barnaul, had carried out solely “legal political work”, Navalny’s crew wrote on the Telegram app.
He was additionally discovered responsible of involvement in a non-profit group “whose activity involves violence against citizens”.
Ostanin was arrested in December 2021 and held in Moscow earlier than being transferred to Barnaul, the place he stood trial.
“Upon my arrival in Barnaul from Moscow, without explanation, I was placed in a solitary cell, about six square metres, in a basement with a window covered with debris,” Ostanin wrote in a letter printed by Navalny’s crew.
“About a week later, the cell was flooded with ankle-deep water…In these cells there were rats, ants, spiders,” he wrote.
Navalny’s crew wrote that investigators had pressured Ostanin to confess his guilt, however he refused.
Navalny, Putin’s best-known critic, is serving sentences totalling 11-1/2 years in a penal colony on fraud and different prices he says have been trumped as much as silence him. Last week Russian state prosecutors requested a courtroom to jail him for an additional 20 years in a brand new prison trial for prices together with extremism.
Last month one other Navalny campaigner, Liliya Chanysheva, was sentenced to 7-1/2 years for “extremism”.
Source: www.anews.com.tr
