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For the nearly three years Alexei Navalny has spent in jail, the Russian opposition leader has fought deprivation with stoicism and humor.
At different moments, he has complained of being denied access to walks, food parcels, the radio, contact with his family and even fellow prisoners — all while seemingly remaining unfazed.
But when last Friday he was told by journalists at a court hearing that he had no lawyer, he seemed genuinely stunned.
“No way! There’s a raid at Kobzev’s?” Navalny can be heard saying in an audio recording, referring to his long-time lawyer Vadim Kobzev.
Several days later he learned, again from journalists, that Kobzev and two other lawyers he had worked with, Alexei Liptser and Igor Sergunin, were in pre-trial detention. They face up to six years in prison for “participation in an extremist organization.”
Two other acting lawyers of Navalny’s, Olga Mikhailova and Alexander Fedyulov, are outside Russia and will presumably remain so to avoid their colleagues’ fate.
In the long saga of Navalny’s persecution, the collective crackdown on his lawyers marks a new phase, both for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s biggest political rival and for what remains of civil society in Russia.
“As in Soviet times, not just political activists are persecuted, turning them into political prisoners, but also their lawyers,” Navalny said in the audio recording in an immediate reaction to the news at the Friday hearing.
Legal platform
As of this week, more than 1,000 days have passed since Navalny was arrested upon returning to Russia from Germany where he received treatment after being near-fatally poisoned.
Throughout that period, and despite being kept in solitary confinement for long stretches at a time, Navalny has maintained a public presence, through social media and by turning the authorities’ weapon against them.
Since his jailing he has filed dozens of lawsuits against what he says are infractions by the prison authorities. As a result, his team estimates he has attended more than 300 court hearings in the past year alone.
Although most of those hearings have been held in make-shift courtrooms in prison, with Navalny appearing remotely via video link, they have provided his entourage and the wider public with opportunities to see and hear him.
And Navalny has used the hearings to showcase his fighting spirit and hold speeches, turning the courtroom into just the political stage the Kremlin so badly wants to deny him.
During these court appearances, and in his social media posts, Navalny has seemed remarkably up-to-speed on current events.
His lawyers are now being accused of having facilitated that through the “regular transfer of information between the leaders and participants of an extremist organization,” said Ivan Zhdanov, a lawyer himself and the head of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
Citing case documents, which POLITICO could not verify because they have not been made public, Zhdanov said prosecutors have listed as incriminating evidence a number of online videos published on platforms linked to Navalny. Zhdanov said the videos all dealt with Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
How Navalny succeeds in receiving information and getting his messages out despite being under round-the-clock surveillance is a secret closely guarded by his team.
Legal crackdown
Navalny’s supporters are convinced the move against his lawyers is part of an effort to muzzle him.
The arrests came shortly after an August ruling entered into force sentencing Navalny to 19 years in a special regime prison for, among other charges, extremism. Fears are he might be transferred to a far-flung region any day now, quarantining him ahead of presidential elections in March next year.
With no or fewer lawyers, his team warned, maintaining oversight and keeping him from harm will be even more difficult. “Terryfing,” Navalny’s close ally Leonid Volkov said on X.
The arrests also send a broader signal to Russian lawyers that they are one step removed from acting as the defense … to becoming the defendant.
“Lawyers are being equated with those they are defending,” said Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer with the Russian human rights group Pervy Otdel. “So if they defend Navalny, then they themselves are participants in extremist activity.”
The legal profession in Russia has long been under pressure, with several high-profile lawyers, Smirnov among them, fleeing Russia in recent years for fear of persecution.
But the war against Ukraine has ramped up the heat and provided the authorities with extra ammunition to go after them. In one example, Dmitry Talantov, a prominent lawyer best known for defending a prominent high treason suspect, faces up to ten years in prison for spreading “fake news” about Russia’s army.
As a softer measure which attracts less public attention, lawyers can also be stripped of their licenses for not following the Kremlin’s line. A recent government proposal suggests revoking the licenses of those who have been outside of Russia for longer than a year “without a good reason,” in a move clearly aimed at purging the profession of the regime’s critics.
Even within that context, the arrest of Navalny’s lawyers is remarkable both for the number of lawyers arrested, as well as in the severity of their treatment and charges.
Journalist Pavel Kanygin, who is a close friend of Lipster, one of the arrested lawyers, said that a special forces team wearing masks showed up at the lawyer’s home in the early morning hours last Friday, waking his wife and two-year-old daughter.
For the next several hours they turned Lipster’s home upside down; presumably in search of evidence tying him to Navalny, even though he has not worked for the politician since summer 2022, Kanygin said.
Case for the defense
With acquittal rates in Russia below one percent, and the number of political prisoners in Russia steadily rising, some have asked whether defense lawyers still have a meaningful role to play.
Smirnov compared what lawyers can offer to palliative care. “It’s like a doctor who treats someone with a serious disease and a hopeless prognosis,” he said. “You still treat them and take them by the hand to reduce their suffering.”
He added that lawyers help defendants to avoid “making stupid mistakes” under pressure from law enforcement, and, as in Navalny’s case, throw up legal hurdles. “We can’t make it too simple for them to just imprison people,” Smirnov said. “There needs to be resistance so that they don’t lose all sense of the limits.”
In response to the arrests, a group of lawyers has launched a petition calling for a three-day strike from October 25 to protest the “atmosphere of violence and torture, intimidation, direct threats to freedom, health and life.”
To date, the petition has been signed by roughly 230 people, a mere sliver of Russia’s community of lawyers which comprises tens of thousands of legal practitioners.
The risks involved in signing the petition are significant and have likely scared people off, several lawyers told POLITICO. Especially since Russia’s Deputy Justice Minister Mikhail Beskhmelnitsyn was cited by state news agency TASS as warning lawyers against joining next week’s strike. Russia’s Federal Chamber of Lawyers, meanwhile, in a statement asked its members to refrain from actions of “a political nature” and “demagogic noise.”
Andrei Ragulin, the petition’s co-author, described the statement as a sign the chamber had surrendered its role in protecting lawyers’ interests.
He added that despite the low number of signatories he was “pleased with the fact that there are still people who are not afraid to openly express their opinion on problematic issues.”
“They are the heroes of our time,” he said.
Navalny isolated
Upon learning he once more would have no lawyer at a second hearing on Tuesday, Navalny again appeared at a loss. He told the court he had received a formal letter saying if he didn’t have a lawyer, he “should take steps to find one.”
“Which steps am I supposed to take, when I don’t even understand what’s going on with my lawyers, when no one is allowed to visit me?” he asked according to a transcript of the hearing by Mediazona.
“I don’t know anything,” he added. “I am completely isolated from all information.”
The following day, at yet another hearing, the problem appeared to have been solved. Unbeknownst to Navalny, who appeared by video link, a new lawyer, Leonid Solovyov, had taken up his case. According to journalists who were present, Solovyov was only allowed into the courtroom after the hearing had already begun.
The judge later read out the verdict: Navalny had partly succeeded in contesting the costs he was being forced to pay for the travel of state-linked prison monitors to his hearings. He now owed them 6,905 rubles (around €70), not 21,000 rubles.
Right after that, the video stream was turned off, giving Solovyov and Navalny no time to confer and plunging the politician back into isolation.
And yet somehow a day later a new post appeared on Navalny’s blog, in which he expressed his support for the detained lawyers and called on their colleagues to come to their defense.
“I have always urged Russian citizens and I am urging them now to constantly, always, at every opportunity; act, campaign and vote against Putin and his United Russia,” the text read.
“This is not extremism, but a legitimate struggle against an illegitimate government.”
