A Russian court has stopped a presidential bid by Alexei Navalny, the country's most popular opposition politician, by resurrecting a criminal conviction from 2013.
The decision reflects jitters in the Kremlin as President Vladimir Putin weighs his re-election strategy amid uncertainty about Russia's international relations, given elections in key European capitals and the incipient relationship with Donald Trump's US administration.
The Leninsky district court in the city of Kirov on Wednesday found Mr Navalny guilty of organising a scheme to defraud state company Kirovles of timber worth more than $500,000. He was given a suspended five-year prison sentence.
The verdict was the result of a hasty retrial after Russia’s supreme court unexpectedly cancelled the original sentence against Mr Navalny in December, after the European Court of Human Rights found he had not been given a fair trial.
It is the latest in a series of attempts to halt the charismatic lawyer and anti-corruption blogger’s political career with what Mr Navalny, independent legal experts and foreign judges have dismissed as groundless charges.
“[This] means that the Kremlin sees me and my campaign as too dangerous,” Mr Navalny said from the courtroom on Wednesday, vowing to challenge the ruling until it was overturned. “What happens in our court rooms is only what is forced on them by the Kremlin. We need a normal, free, clean country.”
Criminal conviction
The supreme court’s decision late last year resulted in the lifting of a ban on Mr Navalny running for elected office connected to the earlier criminal conviction.
Many observers saw the move as a sign the Kremlin was ready to allow him to participate in next year’s presidential election to make the contest more lively and lend legitimacy to Mr Putin’s eventual victory. Mr Navalny used the time to declare his candidacy, establish a campaign staff and start raising funds.
Mr Putin has not yet announced his candidacy, but Kremlin officials say they expect him to start campaigning by the deadline in December. “Of course he runs, and of course he wins – what’s the point making much fuss about that now?” said a senior official in the presidential administration.
But other people familiar with the Kremlin’s planning said external risks were making the president’s domestic political advisers more cautious.
"It is hard to predict how interaction with the Trump administration will turn out. It is also hard to predict what will happen in Europe with all those elections," said a political strategist and former Kremlin official. "If the elections in Europe spark new tension with Russia, the framework for this election will be quite different from what we expect now."
Some observers believe Mr Putin might step aside and arrange for a trusted lieutenant to run in his place. In that scenario Mr Navalny could be seen to represent a greater threat, as he would be challenging a less popular candidate than Mr Putin.
Mr Navalny’s candidacy had already run into trouble. At the same time as the Kirov court hearing his campaign’s electronic cash account used for fundraising was blocked. Russian media cited anonymous sources in the judiciary as saying there had been “directives” from above that Mr Navalny must be convicted again.
The renewed conviction bars him from officially registering to fight the election.
‘Grave crime’
"The guilty verdict means he can't run for president because the relevant paragraph is considered a grave crime, and convictions of grave crimes lead to a ban on running for public office," said Olga Mikhailova, one of Mr Navalny's lawyers.
But Mr Navalny greeted the court’s decision with defiance. “I don’t recognise this verdict, it will be annulled in the end, and I will run for president,” he said, arguing that the ECHR’s verdict had not been carried out.
Wednesday’s ruling, read out by judge Alexei Vtyugin in a four-hour mumble at machine-gun speed as is common in Russian courts, was an almost exact copy of the verdict the supreme court had rejected and ordered a retrial over in December.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017