Opposition figure Leonid Volkov, based in Lithuania, has been found guilty on dozens of charges by a military court.
Russian dissident and Kremlin critic Leonid Volkov, a prominent ally of the late opposition leader Alexey Navalny, has been sentenced in absentia to 18 years in prison.
The sentence was handed down by a Russian military court on Wednesday that found Volkov guilty on dozens of charges, including spreading fake news about the war in Ukraine and “justifying terrorism”.
“Volkov was found guilty of more than 40 episodes of crimes in nine criminal cases,” the Interfax news agency said, quoting a Moscow military court.
Volkov, who lives in Lithuania, made light of the verdict, describing the accompanying 2-million-rouble ($25,200) fine as a slap on the wrist.
“And they didn’t ban me from using the internet! Well, I’ll use it then,” he wrote on social media.
In a subsequent post, he corrected himself and said, after reading the full verdict, that he had in fact been banned from using the internet for 10 years.
“And I’ve already started using it. Damn. What should I do?” he wrote in a jocular riposte.
Volkov, 44, left Russia in 2019 after authorities opened a criminal case against him. He has been on Russia’s wanted list since 2021.
Navalny, the most prominent domestic critic of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, died suddenly in February 2024 in an Arctic penal colony at the age of 47. He had been serving prison terms totalling more than 30 years on fraud, “extremism” and other charges that he said were trumped up to silence him.
The authorities designated his movement as “extremist”, casting it as a Western-backed organisation bent on fomenting unrest and revolution.
Despite Navalny’s death, investigators have continued to launch new cases against his supporters and associates, many of whom have been designated as “foreign agents” or “extremists”.
In January, three lawyers who had worked for Navalny were found guilty of belonging to an “extremist” group and sentenced to terms of up to five and a half years in a penal colony.
In April, four journalists were sentenced to five and a half years each after being found guilty of working for Navalny’s banned organisation.