Alexei Navalny: Judge said sorry for jailing me... and now she's dead
The Russian judge who sent Alexei Navalny to prison died in suspicious circumstances shortly after saying she regretted jailing him, the opposition figure has claimed.
Mr Navalny, who was nearly killed by Novichok poisoning in 2020, made the allegation during an appeal hearing on Tueday just moments before the Moscow court ordered him to be sent to a high-security prison for nine years.
During the rare public appearance, Mr Navalny said Judge Natalya Repnikova – who jailed him in February 2021 - had since passed on a message through her friends that she was “sorry about her decision and her part in it and that she thought I was a brave man.”
“Shortly after that she died of Covid,” Mr Navalny said, according to the Russian media outlet MediaZona.
“I don’t want to speculate but she didn’t strike me as someone in a high-risk group. So if any judges want to pass on a word to me - and they will - please be careful so that you don’t end up seeing forensic experts at your doorstep.”
The 45-year-old politician on Tuesday took the opportunity to condemn the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine.
“I’m certainly ready to stay in jail so that I can keep telling everyone about people dying in Ukraine,” he told the court.
“You can destroy many lives but you will be defeated here and in this stupid war that you are waging.”
Mr Navalny is Russia’s most popular opposition figure and spearheaded anti-Putin Kremlin protests for a decade before falling suddenly ill on a plane to Siberia in summer 2020. He spent more than two weeks in a medically induced coma in Germany before recovering.
He was later proven to have been poisoned with the military-grade Soviet-era Novichok agent. He was jailed and sentenced to two and a half years in prison last February. This March he was given an extra nine years for fraud and contempt of court.
Before he was jailed, Mr Navalny published a damning investigation that shed light on a Kremlin-orchestrated operation to kill him. One of his would-be assassins was heard in a phone conversation admitting to smearing the nerve agent on his underwear.
Mr Navalny is now likely to be more isolated than ever. While he was serving his previous term at a prison colony a short train ride away from Moscow, his lawyers had been able to visit him regularly and pass on messages or take dictation from him to post on social media.
