Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on June 11, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 23, 2026
Add as preferred source on GoogleLeonid Volkov, a Navalny ally, was sentenced to 18 years in absentia by a Russian court, highlighting ongoing repression of Kremlin critics.
MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russian dissident and Kremlin critic Leonid Volkov, a prominent ally of late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was sentenced in absentia on Wednesday to 18 years in prison.
The sentence was handed out by a Russian military court that found Volkov guilty on dozens of charges, including spreading fake news about the war in Ukraine and "justifying terrorism".
Volkov, who lives in Lithuania, made light of the verdict, describing the accompanying 2-million-rouble ($25,400) fine as a slap on the wrist. "And they didn't ban me from using the internet! Well, I'll use it then," he wrote on social media.
In a subsequent post, he corrected himself and said, after reading the full verdict, that he had in fact been banned from using the internet for 10 years.
"And I've already started using it. Damn. What should I do?" he wrote, tongue-in-cheek.
Navalny, the most prominent domestic critic of President Vladimir Putin, died suddenly in February 2024 in an Arctic penal colony at the age of 47. He had been serving prison terms totalling more than 30 years on fraud, extremism and other charges that he said were trumped up to silence him.
The authorities designated his movement as "extremist," casting it as a Western-backed organisation bent on fomenting unrest and revolution.
Despite Navalny's death, investigators have continued to launch new cases against his supporters and associates, many of whom have been designated as "foreign agents" or extremists.
In January, three lawyers who had worked for Navalny were found guilty of belonging to an extremist group and sentenced to terms of up to 5-1/2 years in a penal colony.
In April, four journalists were sentenced to 5-1/2 years each after being found guilty of working for Navalny's banned organisation.
(Reporting by Reuters; writing by Mark Trevelyan; editing by Andrew Osborn and Mark Heinrich)
Leonid Volkov was sentenced in absentia to 18 years in prison by a Russian military court for spreading fake news about the war in Ukraine and justifying terrorism.
Leonid Volkov currently lives in Lithuania.
Volkov described the accompanying 2-million-rouble fine as a slap on the wrist and humorously noted that he had been banned from using the internet for 10 years.
Alexei Navalny, a prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin, died suddenly in February 2024 in an Arctic penal colony at the age of 47.
Despite Navalny's death, investigators have continued to launch new cases against his supporters and associates, many of whom have been designated as foreign agents or extremists.
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