Putin opponent jailed in embezzlement case

Russian president Vladimir Putin’s most charismatic political foe was jailed today on embezzlement charges he insists were “political”.

Armed officers immediately seized Alexei Navalny in the court room and he was taken away on the judge’s orders to start his five-year sentence.

The ruling, if confirmed on appeal, prevents the anti-corruption campaig-ner from running for Moscow mayor this year and is likely to block his ambition to challenge the Kremlin strongman in the 2018 presidential election.

It is expected to spark protests in Moscow later today, though authorities have already fenced off a square close to the Kremlin to prevent any action.

Russia’s opposition and many foreign diplomats branded the prosecution a “show trial” and a return to the Soviet system of locking up political enemies.

Mr Navalny, 37, led a wave of street protests against Mr Putin last year and has constantly accused the president’s circle of corruption involving both vote-rigging and theft of state funds.

He dubbed his United Russia political grouping as “the party of crooks and thieves”. A judge found Navalny guilty of heading a group that embezzled timber worth 16 million rubles (£325,000) from state-owned company Kirovles in 2009.

At the time, the father-of-two was an unpaid adviser to the provincial governor in Kirov, 470 miles east of Moscow.

Mr Navalny has long forecast he would be jailed — and accused the president of personally dictating his sentence. In a tweet moments after the sentence was announced, he urged supporters to continue the campaign to defeat Mr Putin and his government. “Okay, don’t miss me here,” he wrote. “And the main thing — don’t be lazy, the toad will not knock itself down from the oil pipe.” He had listened in silence as judge Sergei Blinov said: “The court has established that Navalny organised a crime and the theft of property on a particularly large scale.”

Mr Navalny’s tweet said the judge was simply parroting the prosecution case in reading his verdict to the Kirov court, which was packed with journalists from around the world. “There’ll be no nice scenario with an acquittal,” he said.