Aleksei Navalny, Critic of Putin, Is Given Suspended Sentence in Fraud Case - New York Times

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Aleksei A. Navalny was convicted of criminal fraud charges on Tuesday in Moscow. Credit Pavel Golovkin/Associated Press

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MOSCOW — A Moscow court on Tuesday convicted the anticorruption crusader and political opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny of criminal fraud charges and handed down a three-and-half-year suspended sentence. The Moscow police braced for a confrontation with thousands of people planning to protest the verdict outside the Kremlin.

The punishment, while sparing Mr. Navalny jail time, suggested that the Russian authorities were moving to sideline Mr. Navalny but not turn him into a political martyr. The verdict came as critics of the government were hoping that the country’s mounting economic problems would begin to loosen President Vladimir V. Putin’s grip on power.

Mr. Navalny’s brother, Oleg, who was charged with him, received a three-and-a-half-year sentence, but it was not suspended and he was immediately jailed.

“Aren’t you ashamed? Why are you jailing him? To punish me more?” Mr. Navalny shouted at the judge, Yelena Korobchenko. He had tears in his eyes as his brother was placed inside a cell in the courtroom.

The stiffer sentence for Mr. Navalny’s brother, who was widely viewed as a pawn in a larger political battle, was a surprise. It signaled that the Kremlin was adopting a more sophisticated, if crueler, strategy in seeking to suppress Mr. Navalny’s political activities.

Mr. Navalny’s own house arrest, imposed in February, was expected to end as soon as the suspended sentence was officially in place.

It was unclear whether by not jailing Mr. Navalny the government expected him to restrain his activities for fear of harm befalling his brother, or whether the effort was intended to portray the prosecution as more driven by facts than politics.

It was also not clear whether the stiffer sentence against Oleg Navalny would be sufficient to sustain the anger of protesters planning to rally near the Kremlin in the bitter cold. Temperatures were below freezing on Tuesday.

Mr. Navalny, in brief remarks to reporters on the courthouse steps, denounced Russia’s political leaders and called for sustained protests. “I call on everyone to keep taking to the streets, including today, until the authorities, who grab innocent people and torture them, are dismissed,” he said.

Outside the courtroom, several dozen supporters of Mr. Navalny said they believed that Oleg Navalny’s sentence was meant to punish his brother. Most said they had expected jail time for both of them. None said they believed that one brother would be imprisoned and the other released.

“So they have taken him hostage,” said Vera Kashtanova, a 70-year-old pensioner huddled in a heavy fur coat against the morning frost.

Ms. Kashtanova said that she had not joined in protests, either during the Soviet era or under Mr. Putin, until this year, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

“I am a Sovok,” she said, using slang that means an old-fashioned Soviet person. “But I am an enlightened Sovok.”

After the sentence was read, a smattering of anti-Navalny protesters sauntered toward the subway, taunting the opposition leader’s supporters.

They wore orange-and-black St. George’s Ribbons, a symbol of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany that more recently has signified support of the Kremlin’s hard-line policies in Ukraine.

“A thief should sit in prison!” one yelled.

Once again, as with the unexpected pardon last year of another Putin nemesis, the former oil tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the verdict seemed to underscore the all-encompassing power — and capriciousness — of the Russian leader and the system that he appears to command by oblique signals.

After nearly a year under house arrest, Mr. Navalny, a lawyer who led months of street protests that followed parliamentary elections tainted by accusations of fraud in December 2011 and who then ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Moscow in 2013, has said that he no longer has hope that Russia’s future can be determined at the ballot box.

“What are we going to go out on the streets for?” he asked in a recent interview with The New York Times. “There are no elections at all anymore. Talking about falsifications is absurd because none of us are allowed to run.”

In another interview, with The Guardian, he said, “In Russia, it will not be elections that provide a change of government.”

Far from cowering, Mr. Navalny has publicly and repeatedly accused Mr. Putin and his closest associates in and out of the government of theft and corruption on a vast scale. He accused them more recently of fomenting war in Ukraine for the sake of securing and expanding power.

He has also made no secret of his own presidential ambitions. And though he has lived for years on the brink of lengthy imprisonment, he has shown no willingness to leave Russia as other prominent critics of Mr. Putin have done in recent years.

Gennadi V. Gudkov, a former member of Parliament, compared the sentencing of the opposition leader’s brother to the policy of detaining relatives used by the Russian security services and a regional leader, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, in Chechnya against Islamic militants.

“It’s been made clear in today’s case against Navalny,” Mr. Gudkov wrote on Twitter, “Putin supports Kadyrov’s idea of punishing relatives.”

Mr. Navalny’s Twitter account, which has at times been managed by his wife or supporters after a court order prohibiting him from using the Internet, featured a message after the ruling saying, “Of all possible sentences, today’s is the most vile.”

The fraud case against Mr. Navalny that was decided on Tuesday is just one of numerous criminal prosecutions that have been brought against him in recent years. All of them are generally regarded as a response by the authorities to his political activism.

In July 2013, Mr. Navalny was convicted of embezzlement after being accused of stealing nearly $500,000 from a state-controlled timber company while working as an unpaid adviser to the governor of the Kirov region. In a dramatic scene, he was sentenced to five years in prison and led from the courtroom in handcuffs, only to be released the next day by a judge who agreed to hear an appeal in the case.

It was while free from prison in that case that Mr. Navalny ran for mayor of Moscow. He drew a surprisingly strong 27.2 percent of the vote despite facing overwhelming obstacles in running against the Kremlin-backed incumbent, Sergei S. Sobyanin.

At the time, it was widely believed that Mr. Sobyanin supported the idea of allowing Mr. Navalny to run as a way of granting some legitimacy to the elections. Although Mr. Sobyanin still had two years left in his term, he had resigned abruptly to force snap elections that gave him a heavy advantage.

In Kirov, the charges were considered baseless by many legal experts and had been thrown out after a local investigation. The case was resurrected by federal officials in Moscow, and the Kremlin made little effort to mask the political motivation of the prosecution.

The fraud case was similarly thin. It began in December 2012 when the federal Investigative Committee accused Mr. Navalny and his brother, who had worked for the Russian postal service, of defrauding a Russian subsidiary of a French cosmetics company, Yves Rocher, by overcharging for shipping services.

The company, which had never reported any problem during its years of working with a company set up by the Navalny brothers, even withdrew a legal complaint that apparently had been submitted at the behest of the authorities.

In some respects, the case seemed almost laughable. Mr. Navalny’s brother, realizing that the cosmetics company had unmet shipping needs from a distribution center in Yaroslavl, reached a deal with a Moscow-area sausage company to fill its empty trucks with perfume and cosmetics for the return trip to the capital.

The Investigative Committee said the Navalny brothers had overcharged the perfume company by about $800,000. When the charges were first announced, Mr. Navalny took to Twitter, one of his favorite platforms, and wrote, “Hey you in the Investigative Committee! Have you gone crazy?”

In another Twitter post, he wrote, “I did not steal your packages, you goats!”

Although Mr. Navalny is known for his sharp tongue and for his deft turns of phrase, no one was laughing in the courtroom this month when prosecutors said they would seek a nine-year prison sentence and an additional year as penalty for previous crimes.

In a closing statement during that hearing, Mr. Navalny railed against the judges, prosecutors and other servants of the Putin government, accusing them of knowingly pursuing false prosecutions. He expressed particular outrage over the treatment of co-defendants in his cases, including a friend in Kirov, Pyotr Ofitserov, and his brother.

“How many times in his life can a person who has done nothing illegal pronounce his closing words?” Mr. Navalny asked. “In the last year and a half, this is my sixth or 10th closing statement. It’s as if the end of days are coming. All of you — judges, prosecutors, plaintiffs — look down at the table when talking to me. You all say, ‘But Aleksei Anatolyevich, of course you understand everything.'”

“I do understand everything,” Mr. Navalny said. “Nobody will tell his family: ‘Today I have put in prison a person known to be innocent, and I will have to live with it.’ I understand that the same phrase will he heard, ‘Well, but you understand everything’ or ‘Why is he so hard on Putin?'”

Opinion polls have shown Mr. Putin’s support rising sharply after the annexation of Crimea. Mr. Navalny, however, has said that he does not believe the surveys and that, in fact, even supporters of Mr. Putin are prepared to betray him at the first sign of weakness.

A number of opposition figures have long said they hope that weakness will result from economic problems, as a consequence of Mr. Putin’s failure to diversify the economy beyond the main sectors of oil and gas, and a failure to address rampant corruption.

And many believe that Mr. Putin’s toughest moments in his 15 years as Russia’s paramount leader could be just on the horizon.

With the Russian economy taking a two-fisted beating from lower worldwide oil prices and Western sanctions, the ruble has fallen precipitously in recent months. Economists have predicted soaring inflation and a recession — a painful combination known as stagflation that is difficult for policy makers to remedy.

Food prices have already begun to rise sharply, creating the possibility for discontent to spread across the heartland of Russia in a way that it did not after the disputed elections of 2011. Then, the opposition to Mr. Putin was largely confined to the big cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and he crushed it.

Mr. Navalny has said he believes supporters will turn against Mr. Putin.

“These people are waiting,” he said. “The oligarchs, Putin’s ministers and all the others are waiting. They will betray Putin the second they feel like he has weakened. But for now he hasn’t. For now Putin has total authority over Russia.”

Andrew Kramer and Alexandra Odynova contributed reporting.

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