MOSCOW – A Russian judge convicted Aleksei Navalny, an opposition politician and one of the Kremlin’s most charismatic critics, of fraud charges Wednesday, a move that bars him from running for the presidency next year.
President Vladimir Putin — in power since 2000, as president, then prime minister and again as president — is expected to seek a fourth term next year. Navalny was widely regarded as the only viable rival.
Navalny was given a five-year suspended prison sentence; fined 500,000 rubles, or about $8,400; and barred from participating in the election. He and his supporters dismissed the accusation — that he embezzled about $500,000 worth of timber from a state-owned company — as baseless and politically motivated.
“We don’t recognize this verdict, and it will be overturned,” Navalny told journalists after the verdict was handed down in a provincial court in Kirov, 580 miles east of Moscow. “I have the right to take part in elections, according to the Constitution, and I will fight for that.”
Valery Solovei, a political analyst and professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, said the verdict indicated that the Kremlin was not willing to risk a Navalny candidacy.
“This was discussed from the beginning, whether to allow him to run or not, and surely with Mr. Navalny, the campaign will be more lively,” Solovei, who is known for having correctly predicted many of the Kremlin’s previous moves, said in an interview with the radio station Ekho Moskvy.
“But aren’t the risks too big?” he said, referring to the Kremlin’s thinking. “I have a feeling that people have the need, the urban class, not only the middle one, that something has changed, that they got weary of what is happening.”
The lengthy legal ruling was similar to a judgment issued against Navalny in 2013, which also resulted in a five-year suspended prison sentence. That verdict was overturned by the European Court of Human Rights, and Russia’s supreme court ordered a new trial.
In 2013, after the conviction, Navalny was allowed to run for the mayor of Moscow, garnering 27.2 percent of the vote, just short of the threshold to send him into a runoff against the Kremlin-sponsored candidate. The Kremlin probably wants to avoid a repeat of that situation in the race for the presidency.
Navalny, who was a driving force behind large protests in 2011 and 2012, rose to prominence in a country where dissidents are frequently silenced, exiled or even killed. But in a country where even the political opposition must go through some measure of government approval, the Kremlin has at times found it useful to let critics vent by putting forward a sparring partner.
The new verdict was, word for word, almost identical to the one in 2013. As the judge, Aleksei Vtyurin, read his decision in a barely audible voice, Navalny took to Twitter to mock the proceedings. “This is page 40 now, and there are 77 of them. It’s comfortable to have the verdict at hand,” Navalny said from the courtroom.
The litigation was fairly swift by Russian standards, taking the court a little longer than two months to produce a ruling.
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