Tears and joy: Navalny sent to colony
The Moscow City Court replaced the suspended sentence of opposition blogger Alexei Navalny with 3,5 years in a general regime colony. Navalny was convicted of fraud. In this case, the year spent under house arrest must be taken into account.
While the judge read the verdict, the blissful smile on Navalny’s face gave way to a gloomy expression. His wife burst into tears, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
The blogger's defense announced its intention to challenge the verdict. Navalny's headquarters called on supporters to take to the streets. The center of Moscow is heavily patrolled by police.
“Hateful scoundrels, murderers, thieves, liars and hypocrites. You will definitely answer for everything you have done to our country - from Putin personally to every last disgusting “judge” Repnikova,” Leonid Volkov, a fellow blogger who fled to Berlin, hysterically said in a telegram channel.
"2,5 years. Shitty bitches. Fury. Rabies. America, turn off Swift,” wrote the controversial liberal journalist Bozena Rynska.
But the leader of the Left Front, Sergei Udaltsov, who, through Navalny’s fault, went to prison in 2011 after the riots on Bolotnaya, does not hide his joy.
"Hooray! Justice has triumphed!” Udaltsov wrote.
Political scientist Maxim Zharov believes that the Navalny political project is not finished.
“It would have been completed if for the same 3,5 years (at least) all those people who had been internal Russian beneficiaries of the Navalny project were deprived of the right to hold public office all these years.” But, alas, one cannot expect this,” Zharov wrote.
The project is not only not closed, but on the contrary, it is gaining full power, says semi-liberal political scientist Ilya Grashchenkov.
“Prisoning him is a political act, completing the creation of a “protest icon” that did not exist before. The West will use the “transformed” Navalny to put pressure on the Russian government. Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, he is now almost guaranteed to receive it “Sanctions. Navalny” are now practically guaranteed to hit the establishment. The revelations of the “top of power” will probably continue with renewed vigor,” Grashchenkov prophesies evil.
But his pro-Kremlin colleague Alexei Chesnakov predicts a quick defeat of the non-systemic opposition.
“By now calling for unauthorized actions (essentially, riots), the radical Navalnists are giving the authorities a convenient and justified (one might say legitimate) reason for the final defeat of the FBK political group,” Chesnakov wrote.
Moldovan political scientist Ernest Vardanyan predicts a new round of confrontation between Russia and the West.
“The bet is on raising rates, pardon the pun. This is the beginning of another round of confrontation between Russia and the West. Navalny here is nothing more than a “sacred victim of the regime.” A peculiar Franz Ferdinand of our days (thank you for being alive).
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