The Russian opponent Alexéi Navalni has been sentenced this Friday to 19 years in prison for extremism, as the Moscow City Court has made known in its opinion.

The trial took place in the Vladimir region prison -about 200 kilometers from Moscow-, where he is already serving nine years for fraud. In addition, the prison services prevented the press from being present in the courtroom and the journalists had to follow the hearing on television from another room.

Navalni, 47, will have to serve his sentence in a prison with a special regime, where recidivist prisoners or those who have received life sentences are confined.

“Remains assigned to AA. Navalni a prison sentence for a period of 19 years to be served in a special regime colony,” announced judge Andrei Suvorov in the verdict, collected by the Russian agency TASS.

The magistrate barely took a few minutes to hand down the sentence against Navalni, who appeared in the courtroom dressed in a prisoner's uniform.

The Russian opponent was charged in June with creating an “extremist community”, inciting extremism, founding organizations that violate citizens' rights, financing extremism, leading minors to carry out “dangerous acts” and “rehabilitating Nazism”.

Navalni, a critic of the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin, is already serving a nine-year sentence for crimes of fraud and contempt linked to fundraising for the activities of the Anti-Corruption Fund (FBK), an organization founded by himself and classified as “extremist” by Moscow.

According to the extra-parliamentary opposition, he will not go free as long as Putin, who will most likely run for re-election in 2024, remains in power.

Navalni, who had predicted that he would receive a “Stalinist” sentence of 18 years, recalled the day before that he must still be tried by a military court for terrorism, which could bring him, according to his forecasts, another ten years.

In addition, he asked his co-religionists not to give up and to continue protesting against the Kremlin, even if that protest is silent.

“There is nothing shameful in choosing the safest form of protest. It is shameful to do nothing and be intimidated,” he said on Telegram.

Navalni was jailed in January 2021 when he returned to Moscow from Berlin, where he had been recovering from a poisoning that he and Western governments blamed on Putin's security service.

With this new sentence, the western chancelleries have demanded his release