Russia adds Putin critic Navalny to list of ‘terrorists and extremists’

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MOSCOW (Reuters) – Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny and a handful of his allies had been added on Tuesday to an official list of “terrorists and extremists”, the newest in a sequence of strikes by Russian authorities to stamp out their opposition to President Vladimir Putin.

News businesses reported individually that the federal jail service had demanded that Navalny’s brother Oleg be given an actual jail time period in place of a one-year suspended sentence handed to him final yr.

Navalny, an anti-corruption campaigner and a thorn in Putin’s aspect for the previous decade, survived being poisoned with a nerve agent in 2020 and was jailed final yr on parole violations associated to an earlier fraud case he says was trumped up. His political community was banned as “extremist” final yr.

The “terrorist” itemizing by the state monetary monitoring service means Navalny and the members of his workforce are topic to limits on financial institution transactions and want to search approval each time they need to use their accounts.

Navalny’s chief of employees Leonid Volkov stated on Facebook: “I’m proud to work in our effective workforce of ‘extremists and terrorists’. By devaluing the that means of phrases and turning their that means inside out, the Kremlin is digging a deeper gap for itself. It’s doing all it might probably to make those that nonetheless imagine Putin cease believing him.”

Lyubov Sobol, one of the faces of Navalny’s standard YouTube channel, instructed Ekho Moskvy radio that Putin was declaring anybody he did not like to be a terrorist.

Sobol was added to the list on Tuesday, and Volkov earlier this month. Both are amongst a bunch of Navalny’s main allies who’ve fled Russia to keep away from arrest.

Navalny’s brother Oleg was given a one-year suspended sentence final August. He was amongst a bunch of individuals accused of inciting individuals to break COVID-19 restrictions by attending unauthorised protests in January 2021.

(Reporting by Anton Kolodyazhnyy, Maria Tsvetkova, Alexander Marrow and Anton Zverev; writing by Mark Trevelyan; enhancing by Alexandra Hudson)



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