Russia's top court extends detention for Navalny's lawyers, pending trial on extremism charges

MOSCOW (AP) — Russia’s Supreme Court on Tuesday extended the pre-trial detention of three lawyers who once represented Russia’s slain opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, and are now facing charges of extremism. It also refused to transfer their case to a different court, even as the defense alleged a conflict of interest.

Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin, and Alexei Liptser were arrested in October in a case widely seen at the time as a means to ramp up pressure on the Kremlin's fiercest foe.

According to Navalny’s allies, authorities accused the lawyers of using their status as defense attorneys to pass letters from the imprisoned politician to his team, thus serving as intermediaries between Navalny and what they called his “extremist group.”

Navalny’s organizations in Russia — the Foundation for Fighting Corruption and a vast network of regional offices — were outlawed and labeled as extremist groups in 2021, a step that exposed anyone involved with them to prosecution.

Lawyers for the three attorneys had petitioned the Supreme Court to transfer their case away from a court in Russia’s western Vladimir region, claiming it may not be objective or impartial.

The defense argued the bulk of the prosecution’s evidence was gathered in a law enforcement raid they consider illegal, and that had been ordered by a superior court in the same region — something they said constituted a conflict of interest. It also charged that courts in Vladimir had pressured Navalny's lawyers to disclose confidential communications with him before the politician's February death in a remote Arctic prison.

Navalny himself had been serving prison terms totaling more than 30 years, including on extremism charges tied to his anti-corruption activism. He and his allies had rejected all charges against him as politically motivated, and accused the Kremlin of seeking to jail him for life.

Russian authorities in February also put two more of Navalny’s lawyers on a wanted list. One of them, Olga Mikhailova, who had defended the politician for a decade, said she had been previously charged in absentia with extremism after fleeing the country. The other, Alexander Fedulov, also said last year that he was no longer in Russia.