RUSSIA ADDS NAVALNY, SEVERAL ASSOCIATES TO ‘TERRORISTS AND EXTREMISTS’ LIST

Tue 25 January 2022:

Russian authorities have put Alexey Navalny, a jailed Kremlin critic, and a group of his supporters to an official list of “terrorists and extremists.”

Local news outlets also reported on Tuesday that the federal prison service had demanded that Navalny’s brother Oleg be given a prison sentence instead of the one-year suspended sentence he received last year.

Navalny, an anti-corruption campaigner and the most vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin for the past decade, survived being poisoned with a nerve agent in 2020 and was jailed last year on parole violations related to an earlier fraud case he says was trumped up. His political network was banned as “extremist” last year.

The Federal Service for Financial Monitoring (Rosfinmonitoring) has designated Navalny and his crew as “terrorists,” putting restrictions on their bank transactions and requiring them to get approval every time they wish to use their accounts.

Sobol was added to the list on Tuesday, and Volkov earlier this month. Both are among Navalny’s top allies who have fled Russia to avoid being arrested.

Investigators questioned several former regional Navalny coordinators last month, including Ksenia Fadeyeva, who is also a lawmaker in Tomsk, Siberia. On Tuesday, she was added to the list of “terrorists.”

Navalny’s brother Oleg was given a one-year suspended sentence last August. He was among a group of individuals accused of “inciting people” to break COVID-19 restrictions by attending unauthorised protests in January 2021.

The European Parliament last year awarded Alexey Navalny the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought after he was nominated but passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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