MOSCOW, June 23 — The legal defence team of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny today made public for the first time the full text of a Russian court ruling that outlawed his political network as “extremist” on June 9.
Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent domestic critic, is serving a 2-1/2 year jail sentence for parole violations he says were trumped up. His jailing has strained Russia’s relations with the West, which has demanded that he be freed and criticised the extremism ruling. The court defined the group as “extremist” on the grounds that its calls for people to protest caused “damage to public order, to public security, to the interests of individuals and companies”.Summarising the document, the legal team said in a statement that the ruling was short of examples of extremism by Navalny’s organisations. The only examples brought were three specific political protests organised in 2019 and 2021.