In Russia, opposition politician Navalny is threatened with up to an additional 10 years in prison

At a time when tensions between the West and Russia were at their highest due to the crisis in Ukraine, a new trial was launched in Russia by an opposition politician Alexei Navalnyia against.

Russia’s best-known political prisoner is now being charged with fraud and is facing up to ten more years in prison. The first hearing of the court was held in the infamous Pokrov prison, about a hundred kilometers east of Moscow, where Navalnyi is serving his sentence.

A video link from the prison to Navalnyi was seen in a room prepared for trial dressed in a prisoner’s outfit. He smiled and hugged his wife next door Julia Navalnaya with guards standing on either side of them.

Human rights organizations have criticized the trial.

– I have not yet been found guilty in this lawsuit, but they are keeping me in the prisoner’s clothes so that the grandmother watching TV thinks ‘she is already in prison,’ Navalnyi said.

Navalnyi, now 45, has been imprisoned for a year after surviving a poisoning attempt he accuses the president of Vladimir Putin administration.

Navalny’s current sentence is two and a half years in prison, but new charges of fraud could result in up to an additional ten years in prison.

Prosecutors said Navalnyi would have led the organization, which had embezzled more than four million euros in donations.

The hearing was held on the same day as the new German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Moscow to meet with Putin over Ukraine crisis. Scholz’s predecessor Angela Merkel on his last visit to Moscow called for the release of Navalny.

Scholz said Wednesday he raised the Navalny case in a conversation with Putin. In a joint news conference with President Putin, Scholz said the Navalny verdict was contrary to the rule of law.

Critics said the trial was deliberately held during the busiest period of the crisis in Ukraine so that no one would pay attention to it.